Taara may have literal vaporware in its corporate heritage, but prospects for this offshoot of a Google Moonshot project now look much more solid.
Over the last year, Taara has followed successful tests of its free-space optics links in a dozen-plus countries by moving to scale up its efforts – both in its core market of middle-mile broadband and in a recent expansion into video distribution.
“We go where fiber can’t go, or where it’s very difficult to reach,” Taara Founder and CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy said in an interview at Web Summit Vancouver hours before a panel he participated in at that conference. “We also go where wireless is running out of bandwidth.”
Taara, a Sanskrit word for “star,” uses invisible pulses of laser light to send data through the air.
Its current enterprise product, Lightbridge, and its upcoming addition, Lightbridge Pro (with general availability expected in Q4), each support transfer speeds of up to 20 Gbit/s over distances up to 12 miles.
“Where you need massive amounts of throughput, that is our strength,” Krishnaswamy said.
Over the air
The underlying photonics concept has already seen widespread adoption inside cables and between satellites, but making that work through varying atmospheric conditions complicates Taara’s task.
Krishnaswamy said that “close to 98, 99% of the time,” Taara’s systems deliver the full advertised speed.
“Fog is a challenge; it disperses light,” he said. “In those scenarios, we basically rate limit and we bring down the speeds slightly.”
Lightbridge Pro will include backup 10 Gbit/s connectivity, either RF or fiber depending on the local situation. Taara has not yet documented this hybrid architecture but plans to share more details in a white paper to be published soon.
Krishnaswamy called pollution less of a problem, depending on “the wavelengths and the particulates in the atmosphere.”
He cited one case where “the whole terminal is covered in soot from all the pollution” but still supports 20 Gbit/s transmissions. In another, however, plastic trash burned near a terminal “caked the window” and broke the optical link.
“If you can see the other side, then you can easily close the link,” Krishnaswamy summarized.
Terrains to target
Taara’s appeal can be strongest in places where geography or economics have thwarted all earlier attempts at broadband buildout.
One of the company’s first installations bridged a fiber-defying obstacle in 2021: the Congo River between Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which at that point is exceptionally deep and swift.
“There’s no way they could run fiber across this fast-moving river,” Krishnaswamy said.
Another early Taara project linked a data center near Nairobi with a community on the other side of a national park, where a local ISP resells that bandwidth to residents at about $10 a month.
In the Philippines, Taara is now working with two local telecom operators to use its links to connect islands and cross rivers and mountains.
Taara has also been able to put its technology to work on its corporate parent’s campus, with an installation at Google’s Gradient Canopy building in Mountain View, California.
“They couldn’t get approval for a fiber permit even though the first Internet landing point is next door in Moffett Field,” Krishnaswamy said.
Taara doesn’t disclose costs, but the CEO offered a cost comparison: “By the time you have to dig and trench a kilometer of fiber, this is going to be very economical.”
Data centers are among its target customers.
“We need a mechanism to provide quick connectivity, to get things started,” Krishnaswamy said, calling Taara’s rapid deployment capability “like dark fiber, but in the sky.”
He sees last-mile broadband as an “end goal,” although today’s economics don’t support that. An upcoming, smaller device called Beam – Taara isn’t talking shipping dates yet – may help with that. Beam promises up to 25 Gbit/s speeds over up to 6.2 miles using a silicon photonics chip instead of mechanically steered mirrors.
No longer thin air
The core connectivity idea of Taara dates to Project Loon, a venture from Alphabet’s X innovation lab launched in 2014 that sought to use stratospheric balloons filled with lighter-than-air gases to relay broadband to reach a market of potentially 1 billion people.
But Loon’s high costs proved to be insurmountable, leading Alphabet to ground the project in 2021.
Krishnaswamy called the balloon idea “a revolutionary concept” that was not a wasted moonshot effort because it demonstrated that lasers could reliably send data from one balloon to another.
“We call it moonshot composting,” he said. “We spend a lot of money trying to innovate, but sometimes you realize that the core nuggets of building that huge technology could actually be used in other places.”