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Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

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Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#261

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#262

Post by BurningFrog »

stevenwoo wrote: post #169
BurningFrog wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Second Variety, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety I've commented this before but it is closer to Terminator than the Harlan Ellison story IMO.

Yeah, that was the one. Really burned itself into my mind.

The movie was OK, but you can only get shocked once.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#263

Post by marliechiller »

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.

£10/month pay as you go SIM for 30gb here in the UK and im sure there are better offers

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#264

Post by lupusreal »

proaralyst wrote: post #228
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…

Ukraine's drones are already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away.[0][1] They're also using drones that trail a fibre optic over several kilometres to avoid jamming.[2] [0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/site…

> already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away

This capability is basically a reinvention of the walleye television bomb, which locked onto targets using edge detection on a signal from an internal television camera. 1960s technology.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#265

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

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…

Militaries have been using point to point laser or microwave for things for decades. They've also used coiled fiber optics (and still do) for missles, etc.

It's really easy to blast an area with high power disruptive radiation (EFI, RFI, laser, etc.) to deny comms, though.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#266

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #13

RONJA[0] with lasers? >smile Free space optics always seemed like a neat idea. For space-based communication, particularly if your "mission" involves as little stray emission as possible, I would think free space optics would be a win. I would assume there's more error correction, but otherwise I wonder how dramatically this differs from modulating light on a fiber. It seems like a similar problem. [0] https://en.wik…

Intersting... my physics class in high school (late 80s) made an RF modulated laser transmission system for sending analog video between two buildings a few miles apart. It worked great. I didn't think it was that big of a deal at the time since we had already done microwave and other frequencies.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#267

Post by ants_everywhere »

echoangle wrote: post #227
ants_everywhere wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s why I said the guidance is only really usable for nuclear weapons. I wasn’t saying the guidance is bad, I was saying it’s not accurate to a few meters. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43393504

Oh you're right, my bad. I got lost in the conversation and looking into the types of guidance systems and I forgot that was your original point.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#268

Post by Narew »

mmaunder wrote: post #177

This doesn't work in fog. Space lasers are great. No fog. Everyone wants the 500 Terahertz frequencies to work because bandwidth. They have about 25,000 times the carrying capacity of say 20 Ghz. The lower Ghz stuff penetrates weather to varying degrees. Visible light not so much unless it's a vacuum which is perfect. They should move their nodes into space. Oh wait someone already did that.

It's not only fog. Depending on pupil size it can also be rain. But during my thesis 10y ago one of the big limitation on horizontal line of sight laser telecommunication was scintillation due to turbulence. And this phenomenon appear in clear weather condition with heat. So it was limited in clear and sunny weather. I don't know what up time did there expect ? But the bandwidth should fluctuate a lot.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#269

Post by stevenwoo »

BurningFrog wrote: post #262
stevenwoo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second Variety, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety I've commented this before but it is closer to Terminator than the Harlan Ellison story IMO.

Yeah, that was the one. Really burned itself into my mind. The movie was OK, but you can only get shocked once.

Similar but reverse, I felt unfortunate to have read the novelette after watching Terminator because part way in the story I thought - this is almost all of the AI/self replicating autonomous robot points of the Terminator movie just without the time travel. The movie addition of time travel adds a bit of hope to an otherwise totally bleak story resolution.

Re: Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

#270

Post by bialpio »

vel0city wrote: post #231
bialpio wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tello is actually what I use for my secondary data, Fi is my main (mostly because I travel somewhat and the data costs the same in all the destinations I care about without having to juggle SIM cards).

I'm not a good case study because I rarely use more than 2gb in a month, so Mint would come closer to $10 a gig... :)

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