The company appears to be looking to take on SpaceX in terms of the services it offers.
Transmitting through the air is great until there are other things in the airĪalyria says it has its own way of dealing with disruptions, which involves compensating for how something like rain or dust that would distort or scatter the light being used to transmit the data (an important consideration when you’re sending that light through the air and not the protected glass strands that make up fiber optic cables). At the time, the Taara team said that the system was relatively resilient to obstructions like haze, light rain, and birds, but it did admit that Africa’s climate was more ideal than San Francisco’s, where the fog is so constant it has its own Wikipedia article.
#READWRITE FOR GOOGLE FREE#
Project Taara used those lasers, known as the Free Space Optical Communications links, to augment traditional fiber runs, but they could theoretically be used in places where cable runs would be impossible or complicated (like crossing a gorge, canyon, or river, for example). However, Alphabet did have another separate Loon-related laser project that did see the light of day: Project Taara, which provided internet service in Africa using lasers originally intended to connect the balloons together. Evil reference comes straight from Aalyria Bloomberg says its lab has “sculptures of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.”)īloomberg notes that Tightbeam was spun out of a Google project called Sonora, which the company didn’t publicly talk about. That, it seems, is the power of frickin’ laser beams - though they do come with some potential reliability downsides that physical fiber doesn’t, which we’ll touch on in a moment.
The company claims that the system is shockingly fast: “100-1000x faster than anything else available today,” according to a press release. It’s just doing it through the air instead of over a physical connection, which obviously makes it more flexible, especially over long distances.
Tightbeam is meant to transmit data in much the same way as a fiber optic cable, beaming light from one point to another. In theory, the two could work together or separately - Spacetime isn’t just limited to laser-based systems.
#READWRITE FOR GOOGLE SOFTWARE#
Spacetime was originally intended to predict how Loon’s balloons were moving and keep the connections between them strong now, its job is predicting when a Tightbeam station (which can either be ground or satellite-based) will have to hand off its connection to a moving object, like a plane or boat.Īccording to a report from Bloomberg, Aalyria is selling its software now and plans on selling Tightbeam hardware next year. The company inheriting the Google tech is called Aalyria, and while CNBC reports that Alphabet has a minority stake in it, it’s no longer going to be a direct subsidiary of Google’s shell company.Īalyria has two main focuses: Tightbeam, a laser communications system that uses beams of light to transmit data between base stations and endpoints, and Spacetime, the cloud-based software that’s meant to juggle constantly changing connections.
#READWRITE FOR GOOGLE SERIES#
Alphabet’s Loon project, which aimed to provide internet via a series of balloons, was shut down last year - but the tech associated with it has been spun off into a startup that ditches the floating platforms and aims to use lasers and the cloud to provide internet to remote places.
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