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Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

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Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#231

Post by vel0city »

bialpio wrote: post #214
vel0city wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those prices are considerably more expensive than what I pay for service in the US. Even the cheaper one is more than 2x more expensive than what I pay per gig, including unlimited calls and texts + roaming to a lot of North America.

Who's your provider if you don't mind me asking?

Mint. 15GB for $20/mo works out to $1.33/GB while your 2GB plan is $3/GB.

But there are other MVNOs out there like tello which also have a 2GB/$6 plan in the US, and other MVNOs which offer unlimited data for like $25-30/mo like visible and US Cellular.

Plenty of cheap MVNOs out there these days.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#232

Post by vel0city »

jerlam wrote: post #71
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,…

Silicon Valley is an aberration due to its low housing density. Places with more apartments and condos are much more likely to have infrastructure improvements since you can reach a lot more customers with a lot less money. I live a little north of you, and had Webpass (wireless) in 2012 - $50/mo for 100 Mbps. Now it's $70/mo for 1 Gbps, but I'm with another wireless ISP for $35/mo for 500 Mbps.

Here in North Texas a lot of the area has less density than a lot of the bay area, average incomes aren't as high, home values aren't nearly as high. And yet a large portion of the population is served by fiber to the home with 1-5Gbit symmetrical speeds available.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#234

Post by jampekka »

bialpio wrote: post #137
echoangle wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m from Germany and I don’t know a single person with unlimited mobile data. That’s very rare here.

And yet probably everyone you know in EU has a cheaper Internet per GB that folks in the US. I have 2 SIM cards, one provider charges me $10/GB, while the other has a 2-GB packet for $6.

In Finland I pay 20€/mo for unlimited data (bandwidth capped at 200 Mbps). With some shopping around it can be cheaper/have more bandwidth. The pricing has been similar at least since 3g. And I recall having a similar deal in the UK five years ago.

There's also 28 GB EU roaming per month included, and 2.23€/GB after that.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#235

Post by LeifCarrotson »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #229
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…

> Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities They are not obvious to me. Care to explain?

"People with blue and yellow patches are the enemy. I won't be able to communicate with you after you leave the forward base, but you need to navigate about 1 mile southwest then kill the people you find with a blue and yellow patch for as long as you can."

Then the quadcopter/Atlas/Spot/a Terminator/a tank driven by AI starts rolling across the landscape, while humans flagged as suspicious by Google because we lack sufficient tracking data in our browsers fill out reCaptcha images that say "Select all images that contain [soldiers] in this set."

Nearby, a scared local child distracts themselves from the distant horrors by drawing a picture of the sun in the sky with their crayons.

Some time later, the robot is able to transmit back a few bytes of telemetry to base, which publishes a press release that describes the number of enemies slain.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#236

Post by robin_reala »

light_triad wrote: post #17

Apparently the biggest problems are line of sight interruptions and cost: > The team has figured out how to compensate for potential line-of-sight interruptions like bird flights, rain, and wind. (Fog is the biggest impediment) > “It’s fast and reliable but quite expensive.” He says he spent around $30,000 for the last light bridge setup he bought from Alphabet for testing. Interesting that Meta was working on simila…

I was on a patio halfway up a tall building in the City in London, when a guy came out of the office I’d been consulting in and asked me if I wouldn’t mind moving a metre to the left as I was blocking the laser. Turned out that the cheapest and fastest way they’d found to set up a secure network with their sister office in another building a couple of hundred metres away was to set up a laser network. It just happened that line-of-sight was unfortunately obstructable by a six-foot-plus man eating a sandwich. This would have been 2012 / 2013?

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#237

Post by mab122 »

krisoft wrote: post #119
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…

> 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…

> Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.

This sounds like you would also be in favor of backdoored encryption. I disagree. It's a tool / improvement like any other, how you use it makes it scary. BTW this is nothing new, it's just packaged nicely and (I assume) massively improved technology. DIY and open source solutions were possible in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA (static ones tho)

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#238

Post by varispeed »

HPsquared wrote: post #135
aerostable_slug wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To risk being pedantic, US SLBMs (Tridents) indeed use stellar updates for their inertial guidance system. Our ICBMs have no update mechanism at all. Once they're out of the silo, they're completely on their own.

ICBMs would be more confident in their starting position and orientation. SLBMs would necessarily have more uncertainty in the initial conditions.

You can create nuclear load so powerful it won't matter where it hits.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#239

Post by throwpoaster »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #235
selfmodruntime wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities They are not obvious to me. Care to explain?

"People with blue and yellow patches are the enemy. I won't be able to communicate with you after you leave the forward base, but you need to navigate about 1 mile southwest then kill the people you find with a blue and yellow patch for as long as you can." Then the quadcopter/Atlas/Spot/a Terminator/a tank driven by AI starts rolling across the landscape, while humans flagged as suspicious by Google because we lack…

This is an example of the lack of connectivity, not the horror of too much.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#240

Post by froh »

I certainly am missing the point --- targeting internet with electromagnetic waves isn't exactly new technology?

https://www.dfmg.de/en/our-benefits/radio-relay-links.html https://www.dfmg.de/de/unsere-leistungen/richtfunkanbindunge...

so now instead of electromagnetic waves it's light?

what am I missing?

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