Google’s Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by Light

Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” known as X, has long cultivated craziness in its edgy projects. Perhaps the most outlandish was Loon, which aimed to deliver internet via hundreds of high-flying balloons. Loon eventually “graduated” from X as a separate Alphabet division, before its parent company determined that the business model simply didn’t work. By the time that balloon popped in 2021, one of the Loon engineers had already left the project to form a team specifically working on the data transmission part of connectivity—namely, delivering high-bandwidth internet via laser beams. Think fiber optics without the cables. It’s not a new idea, but over the past few years, Taara, as the X project is called, has been quietly perfecting real-world implementations. Now, Alphabet is launching a new generation of its technology—a chip—that it says will not only make Taara a viable option to deliver high-speed internet, but potentially usher in a new era where light does much of the work that ... Read full article.