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Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory, known as X, has cultivated madness for a long time in its avant -garde projects. Perhaps the most extravagant was Loon, which aimed to deliver the Internet through hundreds of high flight balloons. Loon finally “graduated” X as a separate alphabet division, before his parent company determined that the business model simply did not work. At the time the balloon appeared in 2021, one of Loon’s engineers had already left the project to form a team that worked specifically in the part of the connectivity data transmission, that is, delivering the internet of high bandwidth through laser beams. Think of optical fiber without cables.
It is not a new idea, but in recent years, Taara, as the X project is called, has been silently perfecting real world implementations. Now, Alphabet is launching a new generation of its technology, a chip, which says that it will not only make Taara a viable option to offer high -speed internet, but will potentially mark the beginning of a new era in which the light performs much of the work that the radio waves make today, only faster.
The former Loon engineer who runs Taara is Mahhy Krishnaswamy. Since he first connected as a student in his hometown of Chennai, India, he had to go to the United States embassy to get access to a computer, he has been obsessed with connectivity. “Since then, the mission of my life to find ways to put people like me online,” he tells me at the headquarters of X in Mountain View, California. He found his way to the United States and worked in Apple before joining Google in 2013. That is where it was first motivated to use the light for Internet connectivity, not for transmissions to land stations, but for the transfer of high speed data between balloons. Krishnaswamy left Loon in 2016 to form a team to develop that technology, called Taara.
My big question for Krishnaswamy was, who needs it? In the 2010, companies such as Google and Facebook did a lot of trying to connect “the next billion users” with wild projects such as Loon and High Flight drones. (Facebook even worked on the idea that is in Taara’s core: “Invisible light rays … that transmit data 10 times faster than current versions”, like my former colleague Jessi Hempel wrote in 2016. Mark Zuckerberg closed the project in 2018 silently. can connect. That is a reason why X quotes to end Loon. The most notable, Elon Musk Starlink can provide the Internet anywhere in the world, and Amazon is planning a competitor named Kuiper.
But Krishnaswamy says that the global connectivity problem is far from being solved. “Today there are 3 billion people who are not yet connected, and there is a great need to put them online,” he says. In addition, many more people, even in the United States, have internet speeds that cannot even endure transmission. As for Starlink, he says that in dense areas, many people have to share the transmission, and each of them obtains less bandwidth and slower speeds. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times wider band to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it by a fraction of the cost,” he says, although he seems to refer to the future Taara capabilities and not to his current state.
In recent years, Taara has advanced in the implementation of its technology in the real world. Instead of transmitting from space, the “light bridges” of Taara, which are approximately the size of a traffic light, are terrestrial. As the Teller “Captain of Moonshots” says of X, “as long as these two boxes can be seen, 20 gigabits will obtain per second, the equivalent of a fiber optic cable, without having to zangurate the fiber optic cable.” Light bridges have gimbals, mirrors and complicated lenses to concentrate in the right place to establish and maintain the connection. The team has discovered how to compensate for possible interruptions of the line of vision such as bird flights, rain and wind. (Fog is the greatest impediment). Once the high speed transmission is completed from the light bridge to the light bridge, the suppliers still have to use traditional means to obtain the bits from the bridge to the phone or the computer.
Taara is now a commercial operation, which works in more than a dozen countries. One of his successes came to cross the Congo river. On the one hand was Brazzaville, which had a direct fiber connection. On the other hand, Kinshasa, where the Internet used to cost five times more. A Taara Luz bridge that covers the 5 -kilometer river route provided Kinshasha Internet almost equally cheap. Taara was also used at the Coachella 2024 Music Festival, increasing what would have been an overwhelmed cellular. Google is using a light bridge to provide high -speed bandwidth to a building on its new Bayview campus, where it would have been difficult to extend a fiber cable.
Mohamed-Slim Alouini, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of King Abdullah who has worked in optics for a decade, describes Taara as “a Ferrari” of fiber optics. “It’s fast and reliable but quite expensive.” He says he spent about $ 30,000 for the last Light Bridge configuration he bought in Alphabet for the tests.
That could change with the second generation offer of Taara. Taara engineers have used innovative light solutions to create a silicon photonic chip that not only reduces the device on their light bridges to the size of a finger bar, replicating mechanical gimbals and expensive mirrors with solid state circuits, but will eventually allow a single laser to transmit to multiple receptors. Teller says that Taara’s technology could trigger the same type of transformation we saw when data storage moved from tape units to disc units to our current solid state devices.
In the shortest term, Teller and Krishnaswamy expect to see the Taara technology used to provide high bandwidth Internet when the fiber is not available. A case of use would be to deliver elite connectivity to a community of islands right on the high seas. Or provide high -speed internet after a natural disaster. But they also have more ambitious dreams. Teller and Krishnaswamy believe that 6G could be the final iteration to use radio waves. We are hitting a wall in the electromagnetic spectrum, they say. Traditional radiofrequency bands are congested and run out of the available bandwidth, which makes it more difficult to meet our growing demand for rapid and reliable connectivity. “We have a huge world industry that is about to go through a very complex change,” says Teller. The answer, as you see, is light, that believes that it could be the key element in 7g. (Do you think the exaggeration for 5G was bad? Just wait).
Professor Alouini agrees. “Those of us who work in the countryside believe that at some point we will have to trust the optics, because the spectrum is being congested,” he says. Teller imagines thousands of taara chips in mesh networks, throwing rays of light, in everything from phones to data centers and autonomous vehicles. “Then, to the extent that you buy this, it will be a big problem,” he says.
