From Balloons To Beams: Could Photonics Bridge The Digital Divide?

To try to address this problem, Google parent Alphabet's X, The Moonshot Factory previously X Lab created Project Taara to harness the power of light to deliver high-speed internet wirelessly at low cost.

Taara's technological foundation lies in the legacy of another X project, Project Loon, which was cancelled before it reached commercial fruition. While Loon's vision of stratospheric balloons delivering internet faced scalability and cost hurdles, its work in the field of "free-space optical communication" FSOC became the bedrock upon which Taara was built.

Leading the project is Mahesh Krishnaswamy, who suffered from limited internet access in his hometown of Chennai, India.

Taara's innovation lies in FSOC, which is essentially fibre-optic internet without the cables. It transmits data wirelessly through focused, invisible beams of light, typically in the near-infrared spectrum.

• In Kenya, an early deployment with Poa Internet, an internet service provider, revealed unexpected bandwidth reselling by customers. This led to the development of "Taara Share", allowing local entrepreneurs to become internet providers, offering affordable connectivity to their communities through pay-as-you-go transactions.
• In India, a partnership with Bharti Airtel extended internet access to rural and urban areas where fibre deployment is challenging, with Krishnaswamy personally connecting his ancestral village of Osur.
• In Nima, a densely populated suburb of Ghana's capital city, Accra, Teledata ICT has used Taara to deliver low-cost broadband.
• In the Caribbean, Liberty Networks in Anguilla used Taara to maintain connections between islands during a subsea cable repair.
• Even in the US, with its well-developed telecommunications infrastructure, Taara has partnered with T-Mobile USA for temporary 5G backhaul at events like the Coachella music festival.

The project has had some challenges, too, notably the susceptibility of air-transmitted data to weather conditions like fog, rain and dust, as well as the need for a clear line of sight. Maintaining precise alignment of narrow light beams on swaying infrastructure also poses an engineering hurdle.