I agree. Crazy. To quote: "In many cellular network deployments, the cost of the civil and supporting infrastructure (land, tower, security, power, and backha

I agree. Crazy. To quote: "In many cellular network deployments, the cost of the civil and supporting infrastructure (land, tower, security, power, and backhaul) is often much greater than the cost of the cellular access point itself." Indeed, this is not an order of magnitude question - several orders of magnitude. "One of our goals was to make architectural and design improvements that would result in lower costs associated with the civil and supporting infrastructure." Hmm, really? Facebook don't think that the established players in the market are not aggressively pursuing the same design improvements? Will this spur them on? Marginally, yes. This is not a hard market to get into, with commodity off the shelf chips for cells being available (e.g. from Intel via MindSpeed via PicoChip). It's good to see Facebook investing in fundamental R&D. I just can't shake the feeling they are struggling to find areas to make strategic plays if this is the best that they can do.