Meta Connectivity no longer exists.
As part of overall restructuring at Meta, formerly Facebook, assets that were under the entity known as Meta Connectivity are being redistributed to the “Infra” and “Central Products” teams within Meta, the company confirmed to Fierce. The move was first reported by Light Reading.
It's part of a broader clampdown across the industry. In November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was reducing the size of the company by about 13% and letting more than 11,000 employees go. The shutdown of Meta Connectivity is tied to those efforts to become a leaner and more efficient company.
The company plans to continue working closely with telecom ecosystem partners on strategic priorities, although it’s not clear which ones exactly. It’s still involved in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), an effort it helped launch at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona in 2016, and it will continue to work with the connectivity ecosystem on current and future metaverse use cases.
Dan Rabinovitsj, who headed up the Meta Connectivity division, remains with the company, though it’s unclear what his role will be going forward.
In past interviews with Fierce, Rabinovitsj acknowledged Facebook is motivated to get more people connected because it means more people can use its online services. But the company’s general philosophy has been that there’s no silver bullet to make everyone magically connected, resulting in a lot of irons in the fire.
Those efforts included the aforementioned TIP, as well as work on technologies like Magma, Terragraph, shared fiber and subsea cables.
At last February’s MWC in Barcelona, Meta’s message was all about the metaverse and how it takes something akin to a village to develop and maintain it. In fact, it said no single company, or even industry, is capable of sustaining the metaverse on its own.
Over the next decade, its ambition is for the metaverse to reach a billion people around the world, which it said will require fundamental shifts in how networks are built and deployed, as well as industry-wide collaboration from tech companies, mobile operators, service providers, policymakers and more.