The company also said it has invented a new robot called Bombyx, which moves along power lines and wraps fiber cables on them.
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, said the robot could be the “Single largest drops” in the cost of fiber deployment ever as the robot brings down fiber deployment to a “Fraction of the cost”.
“Because underground construction is significantly more expensive than aerial construction, power infrastructure is almost exclusively aerial outside of city centers and affluent communities. To utilize the electrical grid and lower the cost of fiber deployments, we therefore chose to focus on aerial fiber construction,” the company said in a blog post in July.
[Via]
