Facebook is taking baby steps in the rollout of internet in...

Facebook is taking baby steps in the rollout of internet in Australia through a Perth company.

Pentanet is converting its current fixed wireless internet system in Perth to use Facebook developed “Terragraph” wireless units that offer one gigabit speeds across the air. The company says it will think about going national with the partnership.

Pentanet began as a fledgling internet service provider in 2017, employing a handful of staff. This year it raised $40m after listing in January and employs 80 people.

Founder and managing director Stephen Cornish said he’d been talking to Facebook “for years” about using its technology.

The company’s network originally serviced 30 to 40 customers in poorly connected areas of Perth.

Its current technology offers up to 120 megabits per second internet to more than 12,500 customers.

With Facebook’s Terragraph it will be 1000 megabits per second, or one gigabit.

The investment will see Pentanet offer Facebook partnered fixed wireless internet across the city. He said Pentanet is having to install “thousands” of Terragraph units across the city due to their short range, about 250 metres.

In April Pentanet secured a 15-year licence for high-band 5G spectrum covering the greater Perth area. Mr Cornish said the new network was currently under construction. The rollout with Facebook developed technology and supplier Cambium Networks would see its customer base increase from around 9000 to up to 200,000.

The superfast internet also will help Pentanet with a special project – providing cloud gaming. Mr Cornish said the company was the exclusive Australian provider ofNvidia GeForce Now, a rival to Microsoft X Cloud offered in Australia through Telstra. Terragraph sits perfectly with that.

“Facebook has been developing all these new cutting edge technologies for last mile and fibre networks and we’re adopting some of that technology and implementing it into the Australian market because there’s been a hole left with our telecommunications.”

He said Pentanet planned to offer the cheapest gigabit internet plans in the market.

Mr Cornish said the Perth rollout would give Pentanet a blueprint for making its network based on Facebook Terragraph units available nationally.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s grand plan to make the internet available to billions has been a long time coming. He first argued it in 2013, saying then it would be possible in five to 10 years.

Almost a decade on, Facebook says it is building 150,000km of subsea internet cables with partners, much of it centred on Africa and connecting it to Europe and Asia.

The Facebook rollout,detailed in a new blogpost, will include a new 24 fibre-pair undersea internet cable linking the US and Europe that carries 500,000 gigabits of data per second.

The company this week also showed video of an updated version of its Bombyx fully autonomous robot that can wind internet-carrying fibre cable along medium voltage power lines.

Facebook engineers have worked on enabling Bombyx to climb over the power poles and continue cabling using machine vision sensors to help it navigate around obstacles.

Perth is one of two destinations highlighted by Facebook this week as destinations for its Terragraph fixed wireless units, the other being Anchorage, Alaska. Facebook said its partners had shipped more than 30,000 Terragraph units to more than 100 service providers already.

This week Google also announced an investment of $US1bn to boost Africa’s internet access and start-up scene. Spread over five years, the investment includes funding for Google’s Equiano subsea cable, a major private infrastructure project also aimed at ramping up Africa’s high-speed connections.