Google’s Taara hopes to introduce a new era on the Internet driven by light
Alphabet’s Lunar Photo Factory, known as X, has long cultivated madness in its sharp projects. Maybe the most sophisticated was Loonwhich aims to deliver the Internet through hundreds of high -flying balloons. In the end, Loon “finished” X as a separate alphabet department before his mother’s company determines that the business model simply does not work. By the time Balloon jumped out in 2021, one of the Loon engineers had already left the project to form a team specially working on the data transmission part, namely, delivering a high -band internet through laser beams. Consider the optics of the fibers without the cables.
This is not a new idea, but in the last few years, Taara, as the X project has been called, has quietly refined real -world realizations. Now Alphabet is launching a new generation of its technology-chip-to say that it will not only make Taara a viable option for the delivery of high-speed Internet, but will potentially introduce into a new era in which light does much of the work that does radio waves today, only faster.
The former Luni engineer leading Taara is Mahesh Krishnamwami. Ever since he first entered the Internet as a student in his hometown of Chennai, India – he had to go to the US Embassy to gain access to a computer – he was obsessed with connectivity. “Since then, I have done the mission of my life to find ways to bring people like me online,” he tells me at the X headquarters in Mountain View, California. He found his way to America and worked at Apple before joining Google in 2013. It was for the first time that he was motivated to use light for internet connectivity-no shows at ground stations, and for high-speed data transfer between balloons. Krishnamami left Loon in 2016 to create a team to develop this technology called Taara.
My big question to Krishnamami was who needed it? In 2010, companies like Google and Facebook made a big deal to try to connect “next billions of users” with wild projects such as Loon and high -flying drones. . wrote in 2016S Mark Zuckerberg quietly closed the project in 2018) But now, through different approaches, more than the world can Contact. This is one of the reasons X cited to terminate the Moon. The most clear that Starlink of Elon Musk can provide the Internet anywhere in the world, and Amazon plans a competitor named Kuiper.
But Krishnamami says that the problem of global connectivity is far from resolved. “Today, there are still 3 billion people who are not yet connected and there is a sharp need to release them online,” he says. In addition, many more people, including in the US, have internet speeds that can’t even support streaming. As for Starlink, he says that in the above areas, many people need to share the show and each of them receives a smaller bandwidth and more slow speeds. “We can offer 10 if not 100 times more end user bandwidth than a typical Starlink antenna and do it for some of the cost,” he said, although it seems to be the future capabilities of Taara, not his current state.
Over the last few years, Taara has made progress in the application of its technologies in the real world. Instead of shining from space, the “light bridges” of Taara – which are the size of a traffic light – are earthly. As the “Lunar Photos captain” says, “as long as these two boxes are seen, you get 20 gigabits per second, the equivalent of the optical cable without having to skip the optic cable.” Light bridges have sophisticated gimbals, mirrors and lenses to zero in the right place to determine and retain the connection. The team has come up with how to compensate for potential vision breaks such as birds, rain and wind flights. (The fog is the biggest obstacle.) After high-speed transmission ends from light bridge to light bridge, suppliers still need to use traditional means to get the bits from the bridge to the phone or computer.
Taara is now a commercial operation operating in more than a dozen countries. One of his successes came as the Congo River passed. On the one hand was Brazzaville, who had a direct connection with fiber. On the other hand, Kinshasa, where the Internet cost five times more. The Taara’s light bridge, which covers the 5-kilometer waterway, provided the Kinshasha with almost equally cheap internet. Taara was also used at the Coachella 2024 Music Festival, increasing what would be overloaded with a cellular network. Google itself uses a lightweight bridge to provide a high -speed bandwidth in its new BayView campus, where it would be difficult to expand the fiber cable.
Mohammed-Tissue Aluini, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of King Abdullah, who has been working in optics for a decade, describes Taara as Ferrari at optical without fiber. “Fast and reliable but quite expensive.” He says he has spent about $ 30,000 on the last setting of a lightweight bridge he bought from Alphabet to test.
This can change with the offering of the second generation of Taara. Taara’s engineers have used innovative light-loving solutions to create a silicone photon chip that will not only shrink the widget in their light bridges to the size of the nail-securing mechanical gambles and expensive mirrors with a hard chain-but will eventually allow a laser transmitter. Teller says that Taara technology can cause the same type of transformation we saw when data storage is moved from strip to disk drives to our current solid state.
Teller and Krishnaswamy hope to see Taara technology used to provide high bandwidth when the fibers are not available. One case of use will be the delivery of elite connectivity to the island community right on the shore. Or providing high -speed internet after a natural disaster. But they also have more ambitious dreams. Teller and Krishnaswamy believe that 6G may be the latest iteration of radio waves. We hit a wall on the electromagnetic spectrum, they say. Traditional radio frequency strips are overloaded and exhaust the available bandwidth, which makes it more difficult to satisfy our growing demand for fast, reliable connectivity. “We have a huge industry worldwide that will go through a very complicated change,” Teller says. The answer, as he sees, is a cure – who thinks he can be the key element in 7G. (Do you think over 5G was bad? Just wait.)
Professor Alwini agrees. “Those of us who work in the area fully believe that at one point we will have to rely on optics because the spectrum is overloaded,” he says. Teller provides thousands of taara chips on mesh nets, shedding light rays, in everything from phones to data centers to autonomous vehicles. “So as far as you buy this, it will be a very big deal,” he says.
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