The “Moonshot Factory” from Alphabet, known as X, has long cultivated madness in its exciting projects. Perhaps it was the most strange colorIt aims to connect the Internet across hundreds of high flying balloons. Ultimately graduated from X as a separate alphabet section, before her mother company decided that the business model did not simply succeed. By the time when a balloon appeared in 2021, one of Loon engineers had already left the project to form a special team working on the data transfer part of the connection-that is, the provision of a high-range internet online through laser symptoms. Think about optics fibers without cables.
It is not a new idea, but during the past few years, Taara, as it is called the X project, quietly mastered the real world applications. Now, Alphabet launches a new generation of its technology –chipIt says it will not make Taara a applicable option only to provide a high -speed internet, but it is likely to start in a new era as Light does a lot of work that radio waves do today, just faster.
Former LON engineer who leads Taara is Mahesh Krishnaswamy. Since he entered the Internet for the first time as a student in his hometown in Chennai, India – he had to go to the American embassy to reach the computer – he was obsessed with communication. “Since then, I have made the task of my life to find ways to bring people like me online,” he told me at the X headquarters in Mountain View, California. He found his way to America and worked for Apple before joining Google in 2013. This is the place that became excited for the first time to use light to internet connection-not to transfer to ground stations, but to transfer high-speed data between balloons. Krishnaswamy Love left in 2016 to form a team to develop this technology, called Taara.
My big question to Krishnaswami was, who needed it? In 2010, companies such as Google and Facebook have provided a great deal of attempting to connect the “billion users of the following” to land projects such as LON and drones. (Working Facebook Even on the idea that is in the heart of Tara – “invisible optical symptoms … which transmits data 10 times faster than current versions”, as my former colleague Jessi Hempel Written in 2016. Mark Zuckerberg quietly closed the project in 2018.) But now, through a variety of styles, more world He can Get the connection. This is one of the reasons that X was cited to finish love. Clearly, Elon Musk’s Starlink can provide the Internet anywhere in the world, and Amazon plans for a competitor called Kuper.
But Krishnaswamy says the global communication problem is far from solving it. “Today there are still 3 billion people who are not connected, and there is an urgent need to bring them online,” he says. In addition, many people, including in the United States, have internet speeds that cannot even support broadcasting. For Starlink, he says that in the most dense areas, many people have to share the transmission, each of them gets a lower hesitation and slower speed. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more than 100 shows to a more final user than the model stars antenna, and do so for a small part of the cost,” he claims, although it appears to indicate the future capabilities of Tara and not its current position.
Over the past few years, Tara has made progress in implementing its technology in the real world. Instead of creativity from space, “light bridges” of Taara – which revolves around the traffic signal size – is a decline. As Captain of Monch Lotus from Astro Teller, as long as these two squares can see each other, you get 20 GB per second, equivalent to optical fiber cable, without the need for optical fiber cable trench. ” Optical bridges have sophisticated tools, mirrors, and lenses to zero in the right place to create and keep contact. The team has discovered how to compensate for the potential interruptions of the vision line such as birds, rain and wind trips. (Fog is the biggest obstacle.
Taara is now a commercial process, working in more than ten countries. One of her successes came in crossing the Congo River. On one side, Brazzaville, who had a direct fiber connection. On the other hand, Kinshasa, where the Internet used to cost five times more. The Taara Light Bridge, which extends to a 5 -km -length of Kinshasha, with approximately cheap internet. Taraa was also used at the Coachella Music 2024 festival, which would have increased what could have been a masculine cell network. Google itself uses a light bridge to provide a high -speed frequency range to a building on the new BayView campus where it was difficult to extend the fiber cable.
Mohamed Salim Alini, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, who has worked in optics a decade ago, describes Tara as “Ferrari” of fiber optical visual. “It is fast and reliable, but it is very expensive.” He says he spent about $ 30,000 to prepare the last light bridge he bought from Alphabet for the test.
This can change with the width of the second generation of Taara. TAARA engineers have used innovative solutions to rescue light to create a silicon light chip that will not reduce the tools in their light bridges to the size of a nail nail-which allows ultimately allowing to celebrate slip with multiple receptors. Tiller says that TAARA technology can lead to the same type of transformation that we have seen when data storage from drives to drive to the current solid status devices has been transferred.
On the shorter period, Teller and Krishnaswamy hopes to see Taara technology used to provide a high -range internet when the fibers are not available. One of the cases of use is to provide elite connection to the island community abroad. Or provide a high -speed internet after a natural disaster. But they also have more ambitious dreams. Teller and Krishnaswamy believe that 6G may be the final repetition of the use of radio waves. We hit the wall on the electromagnetic spectrum, as they say. Traditional radio frequency ranges are crowded and available reinforcement range, making it difficult to meet the increasing demand for rapid and reliable communication. “We have an enormous industry around the world about to pass a very complex change,” says Tiller. The answer, as it sees, is the light – it is believed to be the main element in 7G. (You think the noise of 5G was bad? Just wait.)
Professor Alwini agrees. He says: “Those of us who work in this field fully believe that at some point we will need to rely on optics, because the spectrum is increasingly crowded.” Teller is perceived by thousands of Taraa chips in network networks, throwing symptoms of light, in everything from phones to data centers to independent vehicles. “To the extent you buy this, it will be a very big problem,” he says.
