If you
live in, say, Ukraine, you probably think about Starlink a lot. Since Russia
invaded three years ago, it has been heavily dependent on Starlink for internet
connectivity – especially its military. Rural areas around the world that had
never developed cable connectivity similarly rely on Starlink. It has been a
boon to millions of people.
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| Taara in action. Credit: Taara |
But its CEO/founder Elon Musk has proved, shall we say, unpredictable lately. He’s taken to politics with a passion, supporting President Trump and wielding unknown influence in that Administration. Many worry that Mr. Musk could, on a whim or as a way of strategically applying pressure, simply could turn the service off in selected areas, which would be crippling (he denies that he would). There are not a lot of other great satellite internet options available. The best of the bunch is OneWeb, which is owned by Eutelsat. It has had a rocky history, is much smaller, and would struggle to scale.
Europe is
planning IRIS²
as a way to achieve satellite independence, but it is several years away from being
a viable option. Similar, there’s Amazon’s Project
Kuiper, but let’s put it this way: it’s Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin versus Mr.
Musk’s SpaceX. I.e., some good promise there, but nowhere near delivering at anywhere
near the same scale.
It seems
like we’d need a moonshot to catch, much less surpass, Starlink. Fortunately,
Alphabet has X, its moonshot factory, and it has just spun off a
project that it thinks could rival Starlink and perhaps change how we access
the internet.
The
company is called Taara, and it
uses light to deliver connectivity. Fiber optic uses light as well, but it
needs those pesky cables to transmit it. Taara skips the cable. It’s like ditching
your landline for mobile phone service.
Mahesh Krishnaswamy, CEO of Taara, says:
Taara Lightbridge brings fast, fiber-like internet access to areas where it’s too difficult or expensive to install traditional fiber, like in dense city neighborhoods, over rivers and seas, or across rugged terrains and national parks. In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air, at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second and across distances up to 20 kilometers. Taara’s Lightbridge units deliver high speed, high quality internet and require only a few hours to set up, without the time and cost associated with digging trenches or stringing cables.
Taara is
an outgrowth of Alphabet’s Loon project, which used ballons (instead of satellite
or cable) to establish the connectivity. That effort ran into a number of
regulatory and practical problems, and was shut down in 2021. X was still sold
on using light – lasers! – as a mechanism, and so continued its work. Earlier
efforts were somewhat clunky, involving traffic light-sized devices and a
series of mirrors, but two weeks ago X announced a new chip that
addressed many of these issues.
Mr. Krishnaswamy
said: “…this new chip uses software to steer, track, and correct the beam of
light without bulky moving parts. We've taken most of the core functionality of
the Taara Lightbridge—which is the size of a traffic light—and shrunken it down
to the size of a fingernail.” He told
Steven Levy in Wired: “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth
to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the
cost.”
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| The Taara chip. Credit: Taara |
While Mr. Krishnaswamy acknowledges that currently fiber is high-speed connectivity’s “gold standard,” he sees a different future:
Our team imagines a future where connectivity isn’t bound by cables or constrained by cost. By dramatically reducing the size and complexity of our systems, our aim is to eventually drastically reduce the cost of connectivity, creating a network effect within the industry.
Right now,
the company only has a dozen employees, but is trying to rapidly at least
double that count. Taara is “delivering commercial service in partnership
with Airtel, Liquid
Intelligent Technologies and Liberty Networks, as well as pioneering new approaches to
wireless optical communications deployments with the likes of T-Mobile and Vodafone.” Taara already claims to operate in 12 countries,
such as parts of Africa and India.
The
spin-off was intentional to help spur growth. “We’ve realized over time that
for a good number of the things we create, there’s a lot of benefit to landing
just outside of the Alphabet membrane,” said
Eric (Astro) Teller, X’s captain of moonshots. “They’re going to be able to get
connected quickly to market capital, bring in strategic investors, and
generally be able to scale faster this way.”
Mr. Teller
adds: “If you can figure out how to be the first business that starts moving
data via light, once the whole world moves to that part of the spectrum, we
think Taara is going to be in a really nice place.” I.e., “skating to where the
puck is going to be.”
Taara
expects the new chip to be more widely available in 2026, but don’t expect a
direct-to-consumer approach anytime soon. Think more like serving autonomous
vehicles.
Both Mr.
Teller and Mr. Krishnaswamy told Mr. Levy that 6G may be the last iteration to
be based on radio waves; 7G, they believe, may be based on optics – which would
be great for Taara. “We have an enormous worldwide industry that's about to go
through a very complex change,” Mr. Teller said. “So to the extent that you buy
this, it’s going to be a very big deal.”
Hey, my cable provider still hasn’t upgraded to fiber optics. I had been intrigued by Starlink, but having so much of the world dependent on one company – especially a company run by someone like Elon Musk – makes me very uneasy. I hope OneWeb, Project Kuiper, IRIS2 and others are successful. But I’m really rooting for big breakthroughs like Taara promises.
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