Alphabet’s ‘Moonshot Factory’, known as X, has long been cultivated in its troubled projects. Perhaps the most foreign wage, aimed at delivering internet via hundreds of high -flying balloons. Loon eventually “graduated” X as a separate alphabet section before his parent company determined that the business model simply did not work. By the time the balloon appeared in 2021, one of the wage engineers had already left the project to form a team specifically to the data transmission part of connectivity work-namely, the delivery of a high bandwidth internet via laser rays. Think of fiber optics without the cables.
This is not a new idea, but over the past few years, Taara, as the X project is called, has quietly perfected implementations in the world. Now, alphabet starts a new generation of its technology-a chip-which, according to Taara, is not only a viable option to deliver high-speed internet, but possibly set up a new era where light does much of the work that radio waves are doing today, just faster.
The former wage engineer leading Taara is Mahesh Krishnaswamy. Since he was the first time online 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’ve made it my life mission to find ways to bring people like me online,” he tells me at X’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. He found his way to America and worked at Apple before joining Google in 2013. This is where he first became motivated to use light for internet connection-not for transfers to ground stations, but for high speed transfer between balloons. Krishnaswamy left wage in 2016 to form a team to develop that technology called Taara.
My big question to Krishnaswamy was, who needs it? In the 2010s, companies like Google and Facebook tried to connect much of the “next billion users” with wild projects such as wages and high -flying drones. (Facebook even worked on the idea of the core of Taara – “an invisible rays of light … that convey ten times faster than current versions,” as my former colleague Jessi Hempel wrote in 2016. Mark Zuckerberg closed the project in 2018.) But now, through a variety of approaches, more of the world, more of the world, more of the world can get connected. This is one of the reasons why X was quoted to end wages. The most striking is that Elon Musk’s Starlink can provide internet all over the world, and Amazon plans a participant named Kuiper.
But Krishnaswamy says the global connectivity problem is far from solved. “There are 3 billion people who are not yet connected today, and there is a serious need to bring them online,” he says. In addition, many more people, even in the US, have internet speeds that cannot even support streaming. As far as Starlink is concerned, he says that many people in poet areas should share the transmission, and each one gets less tire -width and slower speeds. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more tire width to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do so for a fraction of the cost,” he claims, although he seems to refer to Taara’s future capabilities and not the current status.
Over the past few years, Taara has made progress in implementing his technology in the real world. Instead of radiating from space, Taara’s “light bridges” – which are about the size of a traffic light – are earth -bound. As X’s “Captain or Moonshots” Astro counter puts it, “as long as these two boxes can see each other, you get 20 gigabits per second, the equivalent of a fiber optic cable, without delaying the fiber optic cable.” Light bridges have complicated gimballs, mirrors and lenses to zero in the right place to establish and keep the connection. The team figured out how to compensate for possible interruptions such as bird flights, rain and wind. (Fog is the biggest obstacle.) Once the high velocity transfer from Light Bridge to Light Bridge is completed, providers must still use traditional resources to get the pieces of the bridge to the phone or computer.
Taara is now a commercial operation that works in more than a dozen countries. One of his successes came to cross the Congo River. On the one hand was Brazzaville, who had a direct fiber connection. On the other hand, Kinshasa, where internet costs five times more. A Taara light bridge spanning the 5km waterway provided Kinshasha with almost equally cheap internet. Taara was also used on the 2024 Coachella Music Festival, which would have been an overwhelming cellular network. Google itself uses a light bridge to provide a high velocity of bandwidth to a building on its new Bayview campus, where it would have been difficult to expand a fiber cable.
Mohamed-smart Alouini, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology who has worked on optics for a decade, describes Taara as a fiber-free fiber-free optical. “It’s fast and reliable, but very expensive.” He says he spent about $ 30,000 for the last light bridge setup he bought from Alphabet for testing.
This can change with Taara’s second-generation offering. Taara’s engineers have used innovative solutions for light acquisitions to create a silicon photonic slide that will not only reduce the size of a fingernail in its light bridges-by the mechanical gimballs and expensive mirrors with fixed-state streams. Counter says that Taara’s technology can cause the same kind of transformation as we saw when storing data storage from tire drivers to disk drivers to our current fixed condition.
In the shorter term, counter and Krishnaswamy hope to see Taara technology used to provide high-banded internet when fiber is not available. One use case would be to deliver elite connectivity to an island community abroad. Or providing a high velocity internet to a natural disaster. But they also have more ambitious dreams. Counter and Krishnaswamy believe that 6G can be the final iteration to use radio waves. We hit a wall on the electromagnetic spectrum, they say. Traditional radio frequency bands are overcrowded and are in the field of available bandwidth, making it more difficult to meet our growing demand for rapid, reliable connectivity. “We have a huge global industry that is about to do a very complicated change,” says Teller. The answer, as he sees it, is light – which he says is the key element in 7g. (You think the hype for 5g was bad? Just wait.)
Professor Alouini agrees. “Those of us who work in the field fully believe that we will have to rely on optics at some point, because the spectrum becomes overcrowded,” he says. Teller aims thousands of Taara chips in mesh networks, which throw light rays, in everything from phones to data centers to autonomous vehicles. “To the extent that you buy it, it’s going to be a very big case,” he says.