The MoonShot factory of the alphabet, called X, has nurtured the crazy for a long time in its sharp projects. Perhaps the most weird person is LOONAimed at providing the Internet through hundreds of high balloons. Finally, Loon graduated from X as a separate part of the alphabet, before its parent company determined that the business model was simply not working. At the time when the ball appeared in 2021, one of the Loon engineers left the project to set up a special group working on the data transmission section of the connection, namely providing the Internet via bandages via laser beams. Think of optical fiber without a cable.
It was not a new idea, but over the past few years, Taara, as the X project was called, quietly completed the implementation in the real world. Now, the alphabet is launching a new generation of technologyA chipThey say that they will not only turn Taara into a feasible option to provide high -speed Internet, but also have the ability to open a new era, where light performs many jobs that radio waves do today, only faster.
Former engineer Loon, the leader of Taara, is Mahesh Krishnaswamy. Ever since he first went online when he was a student in his hometown Chunai, India, he had to go to the US Embassy to have access to the computer, he was obsessed with the connection. Since then, I have done my duty to find a way to take people like me online, he told me at X's headquarters at Mountain View, California. He found his way to the US and worked at Apple before joining Google in 2013. It was the first time he was motivated to use light for the internet connection not to transmit to the ground stations, but to transfer high -speed data between balls. Krishnaswamy left Loon in 2016 to form a group to develop that technology, called Taara.
My big question for Krishnaswamy is, who needs it? In 2010, companies like Google and Facebook have created a big problem when trying to connect with the next user groups with wild projects like Loon and unmanned aircraft. . Written in 2016. Mark Zuckerberg quietly closed the project in 2018.) But now, through many different approaches, more than the world Maybe Connected. That is a reason X cited to end Loon. The most obvious way, Elon Musk's Starlink can provide the Internet anywhere in the world and Amazon is planning a competitor called Kuiper.
But Krishnaswamy said that the issue of global connection was not solved. Today, 3 billion people have not been connected, and there is a great need to take them online, he said. In addition, many others, including in the US, have an internet speed that cannot even support online broadcasting. For Starlink, he said that in denser areas, many people have to share the transmission, and each of them will be less bandwidth and slower speed. We can provide 10, if not a bandwidth for end users 100 times compared to the typical -Typical Starlink and do it with a part of the cost, he declared, although he seems to be referring to Taara's future capabilities, not the present.
Over the past few years, Taara has made progress in implementing its technology in the real world. Instead of radiant from the space, Taara's light bridges, which are the same size as the traffic lights. As Captain Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller has set it, as long as these two boxes can see each other, you will receive 20 gigabits per second, equivalent to optical cable, without the need for fiber optic groove. Light bridges have gimbals, mirrors and lenses in the wrong number to set and keep the connection. The team has found a way to compensate for potential vision interrupts such as bird, rain and wind flights. .
Taara is currently a commercial activity, working in more than a dozen countries. One of its success has come when crossing the Congo River. One side is Brazzaville, with direct fibers. On the other hand, Kinshasa, where the Internet is used for a five times the price. A Taara light bridge stretches on a 5 km waterway to give Kinshasha Internet almost no less. Taara was also used at the Coachella music festival in 2024, enhancing what would be a mobile network. Google itself is using a light bridge to provide high -speed bandwidth for a building on the new BayView campus, which is difficult to expand the yarn cable.
Mohamed-Slim Alouini, a professor at the University of Science and Technology King Abdullah, who worked in optics for a decade, describing Taara as a ferrari of optical without fiber. “It's fast and reliable but quite expensive.” He said he spent about $ 30,000 for the last light set he bought from the alphabet to test.
That may change with Taara's second generation proposal. Taara engineers used solutions to enhance creative light to create a silicon photonic chip not only shrinking the device in its light bridges with the size of a nail, repeat the mechanical gibals and expensive reflection. Teller says Taara's technology can activate the same type of conversion that we have seen when storing data transferred from tape drives to drives to our current solid state devices.
In the short term, Teller and Krishnaswamy hope to see Taara technology used to provide high bandwidth internet without fiber. One case of use will be an elite connection for an island community right offshore. Or provide high -speed internet after natural disaster. But they also have more ambitious dreams. Teller and Krishnaswamy believe that 6G may be the last repetition to use radio waves. We said a wall on the electromagnetic spectrum, they said. Traditional radio frequency bands are blocked and out of bandwidth, making our increasing demand for fast and reliable connection. Teller we have a huge industry around the world about to experience a very complicated change, Teller said. The answer, as he sees, is the light he thinks might be the main element in 7g. (You think the expression for 5G is bad? Just waiting.)
Professor Alouini agreed. Our people who are working in this field fully believe that at some point, we will need to rely on optics, because the spectrum is blocked, he said. Teller imagines thousands of Taara chips in the network, throwing light beams, in everything, from phones to data centers to autonomous vehicles. So that, so much that you buy this, it will be a huge problem, he said.