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Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

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Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#21

Post by culi »

fsh wrote: post #15

This section from the marketing blurb doesn't sound too promising: When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime. In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.

That's not the market they're going for though. They're more of a competitor to Starlink

There's also obvious applications to places where weather is more predictable. There's plenty of areas and small towns in the Great Basin region that have basically no internet. This would be a quick and easy way to set those places up with internet with more reliability than something like starlink

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#23

Post by refulgentis »

fsh wrote: post #15

This section from the marketing blurb doesn't sound too promising: When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime. In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.

It's interesting at 36 to look back at what I think would disrupt connectivity a decade ago:

- Google Fiber (it wasn't possible to do it cheaper than incumbents, so it devolved to standard incumbent x why would 40% margin company invest billions to get Comcast's peak profit margin of ~15% profit)

- Starry Internet (too expensive to build out, I have it and it's good, but the company certainly didn't scale)

- 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)

It's hard for me to wrap my mind around why this would work at all, sounds like a more-susceptible-to-bad-conditions version of Starry.

I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#24

Post by mattlondon »

fsh wrote: post #15

This section from the marketing blurb doesn't sound too promising: When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime. In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.

Some of their use-case they are crowing about on their site cover temporary things: back haul for major-but-temporary events, tethered-drone-mounted units for emergency disaster recover where a cell site is taken out etc. Those are the sorts of things where laying fibre 20km for use for just a day or two just isn't going to happen, but a temporary laser link that you can get up and running in a hour or two would be great.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#25

Post by crazygringo »

> In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air...

If the light is "invisible" then is it even light? I looked it up and it's infrared.

Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never say "it's emitting infrared light", would you?

Or do they just not want to use the word "radiation" in their marketing, because that sounds scary and cancer-causing?

I'm just curious, since "invisible light" immediately jumped out to me as a contradiction in terms.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#27

Post by andrewl-hn »

cma wrote: post #4

Wait, "Google X" is now just known as "X"? So there is a separate "X" from Alphabet and "X" from tweet all day guy?

The most peculiar detail: at the bottom of https://x.company website in the socials column they literally have a link "X (not us)" to https://www.twitter.com/theteamatx

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#29

Post by bilalel »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #2

It’ll go down at the first sign of rain. We’ve been there with microwave internet.

They seem to take poor weather condition into account as they reserve an amount of power to keep the link up and stable (equipment would be capable of pushing up to 75km) Those were data from first tests they did, might be interesting if they can confirm that in future updates.
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