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Facebook demonstrates record-breaking data rate using millimeter-wave technology
- daxfohl 10y agoBefuddling things: Trump defeating Clinton, Highly-disparaged MacBook Pro outselling highly-acclaimed Surface Book in five days, Facebook (who uses facebook anymore? who ever trusted them?) continually developing and deploying the most awesome commercial tech in the world. EDIT (Yes, to the comments, duh lots of people use facebook, buy disparaged MBP the day it comes out and vote whatever. Some don't even use an oxford comma. I just don't get it.)
- mliker 10y agothat's news to me that MBP is outselling Surface. Also, at least 1 billion people use Facebook so that must count for something.
- brisance 10y agoIt's not a secret that Surface has not been selling well. Actually maybe it is, because the numbers have to be derived by working backwards by dividing revenue with ASP. I think it was something like a million units in the last quarter.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- manigandham 10y ago1.7 billion people use Facebook.
- Retric 10y agoThat is extremely likely to be an inflated estimate.
- WizKid 10y agoWhy?
- Retric 10y agoFake accounts among other things. For example ~0.1% of their users die every month but they often don't get notified etc. Further, FB's own estimates cover a fairly wide range, but they have little incentive to user lower estimates.
- dudurocha 10y agoBy their official numbers, they have 1,18 Bi DAUs and 1,7 Bi MAUs. If somebody dies, they won't be counted as a DAU anymore and in on month won't be counted as a MAU. More numbers in their Q3 earnings reports: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2016-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
- Retric 10y agoThis may seem pedantic. However, it's not uncommon for a relative to log into a dead users account. Thus showing up on DAU and MAU even after death. Users will log in if for no other reason than to notify people that the user passed and mention the funeral date etc. What makes this significant is these accounts where real and FB really can't get accurate numbers for this so it's all internal estimates. So, yes FB's official numbers take this and many other factors into account. However, if their internal estimate is say 5%-40% of accounts are fake they are likely to use a number close to 5% than 40%.
- the_watcher 10y agoWhile that may happen, the frequency is so low (and would happen once, not every month), that it does not materially impact numbers in the billions.
- mcintyre1994 10y ago> who uses facebook anymore? 1.18 billion daily active users on average for September 2016 1.09 billion mobile daily active users on average for September 2016 1.79 billion monthly active users as of September 30, 2016 1.66 billion mobile monthly active users as of September 30, 2016 http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ :)
- throwawayReply 10y agoWhat is a daily active user? If I visit a news site with a "share on facebook" widget which uses a facebook endpoint to get my facebook identity, am I an active facebook user? If I have the mobile app installed which runs in the background getting notifications I never read, am I an active facebook user?
- spullara 10y agoNo. They are very conservative with their numbers. A Facebook user visits the website or the mobile app to count.
- jcoffland 10y agoHow do you know this? Can you back it up?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- smallnamespace 10y agohttp://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/monthly-active-users-definition-revised/629624 http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/monthly-active-users-defin... "We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement."
- SteveNuts 10y agoIt's almost like you're taking your personal experiences and extrapolating them to the entire world. Step out of your bubble.
- daxfohl 10y agoI'm completely with you, but how?
- astrodust 10y agoFollow people on Twitter who you'd never meet in real life, people from different backgrounds or with wildly different points of view. There's no bubble on Twitter but the one you make for yourself.
- intopieces 10y agoUnfortunately, stepping out of my bubble on Twitter would involved reading racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic invectives. I know we're entering the "post-PC" / "PC-backlash" era but that doesn't mean I ought to spend my precious attention on people whose opinions are not worth considering. But, then again, I've never really been on the Twitter train anyway.
- astrodust 10y agoEither you want out of the bubble or you don't. There are people with contrarian views that aren't necessarily completely batshit insane, like those that chug Alex Jones. For example, I've found David Brin to be fairly balanced, far from left-leaning, but not the sort of Libertarian people like Theil aspire to be: https://twitter.com/DavidBrin https://twitter.com/DavidBrin I'm sure other people can post recommendations here.
- intopieces 10y ago> Either you want out of the bubble or you don't. I don't think that's a fair assertion. It's possible to both want to understand opposing points of view but also not have the bandwidth to filter out clearly not-worthwhile text. I'm never unblocking comments on YouTube. I'm never going back to Reddit. It's like being home for Thanksgiving: When the conversation starts with "Well Obama's a Muslim so..." you know it's time to take your turkey plate to the living room and watch the parade.
- pizza 10y agoWelcome to reality
- 1024core 10y agoThey conveniently tested it in SoCal. > Specifically, rain and humidity could result in very high attenuation for terrestrial MMW links and could severely compromise their availability. I imagine this will be useless in most equatorial parts of the world, and probably even south-east US.
- jobu 10y agoIt's unfortunate that they didn't delve deeper into the atmospheric attenuation since the whole point of the project is to deliver internet from UAVs. Seems like the next test should involve a foggy day in San Francisco instead of a "air-to-ground bidirectional link".
- jdc0589 10y agosome tangentially related systems have fallbacks to different wavelengths that penetrate better in sub-optimal conditions. I don't know if it's applicable here, but I imagine it could be.
- jbob2000 10y agoBaby steps. They weren't sure if they could even fly a solar plane, so they figured that out first. Then they weren't sure if they could even communicate with the thing once it's up in the air, so they've just figured that part out. Next step will be to figure out if they can fly and communicate in different weather conditions. And maybe they won't figure that out, but at least they didn't "imagine it was useless" and not even try.
- evgen 10y agoI guess you missed the part where they say they set up a duplicate at a data Center that gets a lot of rain (Prineville, OR in this case)
- jnicholasp 10y agoI didn't read the statement where they discuss this, but Prineville, OR does not get a lot of rain. It is in the eastern Oregon high desert, very near Bend, and it gets more than 200 days per year that are sunny or mostly sunny, the highest number of clear sky days in the state.
- petr_tik 10y agoIf this were sponsored and implemented by a trading firm there would be angry comments about leeches living off honest people's incomes. minimising latency to push another ladBible video into your eye balls is way more moral and better for society apparently.
- johansch 10y agoYeah, I'm going to believe that a company that basically lives on doing A/B testing on engagement in a data sharing GUI (facebook.com) with a hobby in PR-creating "hardware innovation" has suddenly beaten about a hundred thousand world-class RF/EE engineers in e.g. Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens, Qualcomm, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung. The only way FB beats these guys is in marketing reach.
- wmf 10y agoSince those other companies don't talk much about what's in their labs, for all we know they are already ahead of Facebook. Also, consider that Facebook may have hired people with years or decades of experience from those very companies.
- johansch 10y agoWell, this is going to get them to talk about their progress in this field, at least. :)
- wmf 10y agoMaybe. Or maybe the legacy vendors will double down on their old "you need standards compliance, backwards compatibility, support contracts, and a sales channel" line.
- johansch 10y agoI think you're mixing things up. a) These companies do love to brag about technical accomplishments. They each have hundreds of product marketing and engineering people for this purpose alone. b) When they do sell, they will indeed double down on the things you mentioned.
- the_watcher 10y agoSo you're unaware of the open data center work that they have open sourced, which is innovative in countless ways?
- danblick 10y agoSo wait... is the defense industry involved in the Aquila project somehow? The applications to defense/surveillance are obvious, and the aerospace technology (if not the electronics) has been developed for the military/CIA/whatever. Is Facebook getting government money to develop this? Or hoping for that as a market? (Or is it, "We've already got one"?)
- londons_explore 10y agoBy accepting military money, you usually have to sign off that you won't use or sell the tech outside the USA. It usually comes under ITAR regulations too. When you're Facebook, and your main target market for new connectivity technology is Brazil, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, etc, that tends to be problematic.
- jcoffland 10y ago> To put this in perspective, our demonstrated capacity is enough data to stream almost 1,000 ultra-high-definition videos at the same time. Is FB considering getting into the TV market? This would be a way to enter the market and compete with Dish, Time Warner, ATT, etc.
- debt 10y agoFacebook live seems to be doing pretty well so this seems likely.
- daveguy 10y ago1mm wavelength is also known as 300 GHz carrier frequency. The article states they use 30 - 300 GHz carrier with 2GHz bands. Definitely line of sight technology. The graphic shows airplane use with a 30-50 km range. Possibly usable in balloon relays too? (not satellite distances) Links are in the 30-40 Gbps throughput range.
- autocorr 10y agoThe article mentions that water vapor (humidity, fog, clouds, etc.) is the most significant source of attenuation at these frequencies/wavelengths. This is also the most important source of attenuation for radio astronomy observations as well, along with atomic oxygen and ozone. This is why millimeter-wave observatories have to be located in high altitude (> 10,000 feet) and dry locations, like the practical moonscape of the Atacama Plateau in Chile where the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) [1] is. ALMA is a truly amazing instrument that's transforming modern astronomy, and they operate between 4 mm to 0.350 mm (70 to 890 GHz). If you want to see the effect of water vapor on these sorts of astronomical observations, take a look at a nearby telescopes transmission calculator [2], where it shows the percent of light that's transmitted from space to the ground as a function of frequency. The "PWV" means precipitable water vapor, and is the height of a column of water from precipitating all of the water in a 1 centimeter square extended from the ground all the way up. The Atacama is a super dry site, and 1 millimeter of PWV is routine there, but try putting in 100-1000 GHz with 0.5, 2, and 5 millimeters PWV that are typical of other observatories! [1] http://www.almaobservatory.org/ http://www.almaobservatory.org/ [2] http://www.apex-telescope.org/sites/chajnantor/atmosphere/transpwv/ http://www.apex-telescope.org/sites/chajnantor/atmosphere/tr...
- mrfusion 10y agoWould this work for wireless vr?
- ninkendo 10y agoThat's exactly my thought. Short wave wireless to enable extremely high throughput things like uncompressed video (as if it's a wireless HDMI cable) as well as complex signals like accelerometer telemetry, etc mean this is a perfect technology to make the Oculus wireless.