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Alphabet spins laser-based internet company Taara from the “Moonshot” incubator and hopes to turbocharge startups that offer high-bandwidth services to hard-to-reach areas in the competition for Elon Musk’s StarLink network.
Taara is the latest project from Spring from X, the experimental hub of Alphabet, which produced AI Labs’ Google Brain and Waymo autonomous vehicles. This originates in a concept called Loon. It envisions light-firing beams between thousands of balloons floating at the edge of the space to provide telephone and internet services to remote areas.
The runes were rolled up in 2021 due to political and regulatory hurdles to fly balloons and the difficulty of maintaining 20 miles tall equipment. However, the laser found a second life at the Tower of Taara under engineer Mahesh Krishnaswamy.
This technology works by firing the width of the pencil from one traffic size terminal to another to secure it to a 1.5 inch receiver using a system of sensors, optics and mirrors. According to Alphabet, the system can send data in 20 Gigabits over 20 km.
Based in Sunnyvale near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Taara has 20 staff and actively employs them. The startup secures support from Series X Capital, with Alphabet holding minority stakes, but the company refused to disclose details about seed funds or financial targets.
“We’ve noticed over time that there are many benefits to landing just outside the alphabet membrane due to the many things we create,” said Eric “Astro” Teller, captain of X’s Moonshot. “They will be able to connect quickly to market capitalization, introduce strategic investors and grow faster in this way in general.”
Tara already operates in 12 countries, including parts of India and Africa. It created a 5km laser link to the Congo River between Brazzaville and Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has much higher internet costs. It also complements overloaded cell phone networks with events such as the Coachella Music Festival in California.
Krishnaswamy, general manager at Taara, says the next step in development is a small silicon photonic chip that removes the need for many mirrors and lenses in the terminal, allowing multiple connections from a single transmitter. Light-based chip units can also potentially replace radio-based WiFi networks, so-called LIFI, in the offices below the line.
Taara has a long way to go before competing with SpaceX’s Starlink, with its 7,000 satellites generating an estimated $9.3 billion in revenue from 4.7 million subscribers last year.
While Mask’s business sells subscriptions directly to consumers, Taara partners with large telecommunication companies such as Bharti Airtel and T-Mobile to expand its core fiber optic networks to remote locations and urban areas with dense laying cables.
“Think of it as a backbone that will help you expand and register your existing infrastructure,” Krishnaswamy said.
Teller and Krishnaswamy argue that Taara has more technical advantages than Starlink. Musk satellites use radio signals that send a limited amount of bandwidth to a fixed region, which means fewer signals are available to many people in that space, resulting in slower overall speeds.
This makes Starlink most effective on remote locations, cruise ships and airlines, but it cannot compete with city wired or light-based systems with its current capabilities.
Moreover, rather than being blown up into rocket space, Taraara’s terminals are tied to poles, trees or buildings in a few hours, and there is no politicized auction of radio spectra to navigate. The laser beam can intersect without the interference that radio frequencies suffer.
“Connectivity is a pretty big problem. … There are still 300 million people left,” said Krishnaswamy, a rival to Starlink. “I think there’s actually a lot of space for both of us.”
Teller said that as more people come online, the world will need to run out of traditional radio frequency bands and move further through the electromagnetic spectrum.
“If you can understand how to become the first business to start moving data through light, then when the whole world moves to that part of the spectrum, I think Taara is in a really great place,” Teller said, adding, “it’s skating where the pack is.”
