Project Taara has created a way to use lasers to transmit high-speed internet between cities through the open air.
Project Taara is one of Alphabet X's (formerly Google X) so-called moonshot ideas.
Separated by the
Congo River, the world’s deepest and second fastest river, Brazzaville and Kinshasa are only 4.8 kilometers apart —
yet connectivity is five times more expensive in Kinshasa because the fiber connection has to travel more
than 400 kms to route around the river.
After installing Taara’s links to beam connectivity over the
river, Taara’s link served nearly 700 TB of data — the equivalent of watching a FIFA World Cup
match in HD 270,000 times — in 20 days with 99.9% availability.
In the same way traditional
fibre uses light to carry data through cables in the ground, Taara’s wireless optical communication links use
very narrow, invisible beams of light to deliver fiber-like speeds. To create a link, Taara’s terminals search for
each other, detect the other’s beam of light, and lock-in like a handshake to create a high-bandwidth connection.