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18 Mar 2025
Roll out of high-speed laser connections intended to revolutionize internet access in major African cities.
Taara, a spin-out company to emerge from the “Moonshot” unit belonging to Google’s corporate parent Alphabet, says it will use new venture capital funding to scale up its efforts to offer high-speed connectivity using free-space optics.
A blog post from Taara CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy says that the newly independent firm, whose stated mission is to “bring high-speed, affordable and abundant connectivity to people everywhere using beams of light”, has attracted an unspecified level of funding from Series X Capital.
The idea is to provide connections for many of the estimated 2.6 billion people around the world who still cannot access the internet, with initial deployments having already taken place in Africa - including a high-speed laser connection between Kinshasa and Brazzaville, cities straddling the giant Congo river.
Silicon photonics
While Taara’s current approach relies on relatively conventional free-space optics hardware that has been improved with adaptive mirrors to make connections more reliable, the company has also been developing miniaturized versions of the technology using silicon photonics.
In a separate blog post published last month, Krishnaswamy wrote that the firm’s first-generation technology, known as “Taara Lightbridge”, steers light physically using a system of mirrors, sensors, and hardware.
“This new [silicon photonics] chip uses software to steer, track, and correct the beam of light without bulky moving parts,” he explained. “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.”
In a corporate podcast episode covering Taara’s emergence from the earlier efforts of Alphabet’s “Loon” unit - which established both radiofrequency internet connectivity and laser links between balloons in the Earth’s stratosphere - Krishnaswamy said that the new devices had achieved 25 Gb/s chip transmission speeds.
The CEO said that the chips use optical phased arrays to dynamically steer laser light without the need for any moving parts.
And in tests at Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory” laboratory, the Taara team has reportedly transmitted data at 10 Gb/s over a distance of 1 kilometer outdoors using two of the new chips.
“We believe this is the first time silicon photonics chips have transmitted such high-capacity data outdoors at this distance,” Krishnaswamy wrote in February. “And this is just the beginning. We plan to extend both the chip’s range and capacity by creating an iteration with thousands of emitters.”
Africa deployments
So far, Taara says it has deployed hundreds of optical links in more than a dozen countries, including Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“We’re 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,” reported Krishnaswamy.
“We’re also working with innovators and researchers to explore new applications for our recently launched silicon photonic chip.”
While several companies have attempted to commercialize free-space optics for high-speed connectivity in the past, the cost of the technology and the challenge of maintaining reliable optical links in bad weather saw it lose out to more conventional approaches.
The recent exception to that has been in space, where lasers are now being used to send large datasets - for example high-resolution and multispectral Earth imagery - between orbiting and geostationary satellites, and even to ground stations.
Aside from Taara, the free-space optics approach is also being pursued by Aalyria, a Silicon Valley company that has been working with Singapore-based investment group HICO to establish a first-of-a-kind 'marine internet' by deploying up to 200 free-space optical links providing high-speed connectivity for the shipping industry.
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