News Google's newest moonshot delivers internet by firing lasers through the air — Taara project upgrades to tiny 13mm photonic chips placed 1km apart

[Admin]

Taara, Google's current underdog project run by its X research lab, seeks to replace fiber optic cables with above-ground light transmitters.

Google's newest moonshot delivers internet by firing lasers through the air — Taara project upgrades to tiny 13mm photonic chips placed 1km apart : Read more

 

[bit_user]

With the new Taara chip, which shrinks the bridge down to the size of a fingernail, the mechanical alignment process is replaced with software that has allowed researchers to transmit data at 10 Gbps over 1km outdoors.

How is alignment done purely in software? With light, you can't do this stuff by beamforming. Are they using MEMS?

Taara, as a more practical terrestrial solution, avoids some of the traps of satellite connections, such as lower speeds in urban centers, while still having some quirks of its own (anything from misty weather to passing birds could temporarily interrupt the light beam firing your internet).

Right. For a lot of reasons, fiber cable isn't going anywhere. This is, at best, a decent temporary/fallback solution. Lasers are pretty good for communicating over long distances in space, though.

I also wonder about a situation where it's used indoors. Rather than running vast amounts of optical cable inside datacenters, what if you had a certain amount of point-to-point communications via line-of-sight? Maybe this is restricted to certain rooms or compartments, but it could totally change how datacenters are architected.

With Google's track record of prematurely killing off promising projects ...

Oh, you've barely scratched the surface!

https://killedbygoogle.com
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Probably everyone working in tech that's used any Google projects has gotten burned by them at one point or another. At this stage, I just assume anything coming out of Google will become abandonware, at best.

 

[mrdoc22]

Here in Denmark in 90'ties companys used laser to interconnect there many buildings, way before fiber

 

[Notton]

That's a very interesting product.
Is the 20km range limited by the atmosphere or the horizon?
With a 30m tower, you can see the horizon from 19.5km away, so if there's another 30m tower, it should easily be visible from further.

I wonder how it handles winds shaking the towers and throwing off the laser alignment.

 

[bit_user]

I wonder how it handles winds shaking the towers and throwing off the laser alignment.

I think that's why it needed to be the size of a traffic light and contain elaborate machinery to maintain alignment. Note that the new chip-sized transceivers only have a range of 1 km.