KAUST launches new project to bring high speed, reliable community Wi-Fi service

KAUST launches new project to bring high speed, reliable community Wi-Fi service

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has announced that it would bring high-speed, reliable community Wi-Fi service to more than 3,000 people with help of innovative, low-cost radio technology.

This deployment has been conducted in collaboration with the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST) and Meta, and is expected to scale through similar locations across the region, bringing affordable high-speed Internet access to hundreds of thousands of people.

According to the statement, “As a world-class leading research institution, KAUST’s mission includes leveraging cutting-edge research to give back to the community.”

The Modern Architectural Contracting Company (MACC) camp, located about 1.5 km from the KAUST campus, previously offered no Internet connectivity due to the lack of high-speed backhaul and distribution capacity to the Wi-Fi nodes.

Hybrid radio frequency and free space optics (RF/FSO) systems have emerged as a promising solution for reliable high-data-rate wireless connection between KAUST and the MACC camp.

“The deployment of Terragraph, a gigabit wireless technology developed by Meta, is allowing the validation of KAUST research in extreme bandwidth communication (i.e., mm-wave RF and FSO), with the potential to develop new practical switching algorithms for hybrid mm-wave RF/FSO links,” KAUST said in a statement.

“Fiber would have been way too