I’ve written hundreds of articles about broadband internet technology, but I'd never heard about data being transmitted through invisible lasers before. This wasn’t the plot of a sci-fi movie. This was Taara, a graduate of X, Google’s Moonshot Factory, that uses beams of light to transmit data through the air at the speed of light.
I drove 140 miles from my home in Seattle to remote Selah, Washington, to see it in action. Three miles up a rocky dirt road, you’ll find a typical cellular tower, dotted with antennas dating back 40 years.
If you know what you’re looking at, you can read it like a climate scientist reads ice cores. The oldest antennas on the tower could only send 44.74 Megabits of data each second, or about 14% of what the average American home gets today. The biggest could send 1.4Gbps up to 50 miles away. I imagined the giant snare drums beaming birthday texts, Netflix shows and video meetings all over the Yakima valley.
Locating local internet providers
Seeing these aluminum mammoths up close was so overwhelming that I almost missed what I came up here to see: a white box the size of a traffic light tucked into an open corner of the tower.
Taara’s Lightbridge terminal sits on an open corner of the cell tower owned by StarTouch. Jesse Orrall / CNET
The biggest antennas on the tower were capable of sending 1.4 gigabits per second total; Taara can do 20Gbps in both directions, up and downstream, at distances up to 12.4 miles. The first would allow 56 TVs to stream in 4K at the same time. Taara said its terminal could do 800 -- and that was just in the downstream lane.
Locating local internet providers
“The world has moved past the capabilities of that,” said Taara founder and CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy, gesturing toward the largest antennas on the tower. “Fiber is future-proof, but you can’t get it everywhere, like here. That’s why we’re so excited. It’s a sea shift in the way we think about communications.”
Fiber optic internet has been widely considered the gold standard in data transmission for decades, but it can be incredibly difficult to build -- especially in mountainous terrain like Selah. The thin strands of glass that carry data are buried several feet underground, and providers have to navigate a complex permitting process to get them there. Taara bypasses all of that by removing the “fiber” part of the equation and sending it directly through the air.
... continue reading