Alphabet Project Taara

2021: Google began to connect at home to the Internet via laser

In September 2021, it became known about the successful launch of the Project Taara laser system, developed by Alphabet. It connects remote cities to the Internet using laser beams using new technology.

The company built a working plant in Africa and provides communications at a speed of 20 Gbit/s at a distance of about 5 km across the Congo River to a city with a million people, reducing the cost of Internet access for them.

The Taara laser beam travels the distance between Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which are located on opposite banks of the Congo River. Brazzaville has decent Internet, but since no one wanted to run a fiber line through the deepest and second fastest river in the world, Kinshasa uses a fiber line that runs 400 km around the river, and the Internet is five times more expensive there. Alphabet's commercial 20 Gbit/s link has been running for 20 days, and the company claims that about 700 TB of data was processed during this time at 99% of uptime.

Google began to connect at home to the Internet using the Project Taara laser system

Initially, Google built flying cell towers for transmitting the Internet from the sky (via a radio frequency channel), but the company planned to use a laser beam to transfer data from the balloon to the balloon. One of the advantages of laser communication in the sky and space is that little can interfere with the optical beam from point to point. Ground lasers have more interference, since they have to deal with almost everything: rain, fog, birds. Most of the Taara project was aimed at solving all these ground-based problems with interference. Taara, directs the laser into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, as a result of which the laser turns 90 degrees and fires from the front lens. The mirror is movable, which allows both ends of the Taara to make small adjustments.

Alphabet claims that wireless optical communication is not a universal solution, but it can fill in gaps when faster and more reliable methods, such as fiber, cannot be used. Since local weather is the main factor of interference, the company compiled a map of the world with color coding of those places where, in its opinion, the technology will be viable. The red color on the map is a positive sign and means Alphabet expects 99% of the link uptime in the area.^[1]

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