Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

Post by rcpt » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 4:30 AM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #55

seanp2k2 wrote: post #38

When I came to Silicon Valley in the early 2010s and realized that all of the king's horses and all of the king's men could not defeat the scourge that is the US ISP oligopoly even in their own backyards, I knew it was pointless to ever hope for real FTTH in Bay Area markets in the next couple of decades. Wireless solutions have orders of magnitude less bandwidth than fiber, and you can run lots of fiber in a bundle,…

In Silicon Valley, in a neighborhood of $2.5M homes, and thus household incomes on average of probably $600k+. It should be possible to get a fiber rollout, they aren't that expensive. Make a neighborhood ISP, or try and get a municipal ISP.

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 4:48 AM UTC

gonzo wrote: post #138

HPsquared wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Observing distant nuclear fusion, before unleashing it locally.

fission != fusion, but yeah

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 4:56 AM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #44

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #41

I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage. Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons. Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-acc…

But smoke/cloud kills them.

Post by layla5alive » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:04 AM UTC

Game_Ender wrote: post #171

ants_everywhere wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider the primary benefit of pinpointing a particular house in nuclear war?

I don’t know if it matters now but at some point certain targets were hardened to near misses of certain sizes but not direct strikes. So the better your accuracy the smaller the weapon (or fewer) you can use to take out those targets. So you could say the use would be increased certainty your enemies command and control and other bunkers would be destroyed increasing the odds of “winning” whatever happens afterwards…

Post by falcor84 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:12 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #160

krisoft wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities. But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a…

I got seriously terrified by reading a PKD SF story at 15 about the few surviving humans hiding from war drones still hunting people long after the war had ended.