Alphabet turns to lasers to deliver internet to rural areas

Mountain View — Google parent Alphabet tried and failed to bring internet access to rural and remote areas by using high-altitude balloons in the stratosphere.

But now, the company is delivering internet service to remote areas by using beams of light.

The project known as Taara is part of Alphabet’s innovation lab called X, also nicknamed the “Moonshot Factory”. It was initiated in 2016 after attempts at using stratospheric balloons to deliver internet ran into problems due to high costs, said company executives.

This time round, things are progressing better, said Mahesh Krishnaswamy, who leads Taara.

Taara executives and Bharti Airtel, one of India’s largest telecommunications and internet providers, said they are moving towards larger-scale deployment of new laser internet technology in India. Financial details were not disclosed.

Taara is helping to link up internet services in 13 countries, so far including Australia, Kenya and Fiji, said Krishnaswamy. It has struck deals with Econet Group and its subsidiary Liquid Telecom in Africa, internet provider Bluetown in India and Digicel in the Pacific Islands.

“We are trying to be one of the cheapest and the most affordable places where you would be able to get dollar per gigabyte to the end consumers,” he said.

Taara’s machine is the size of traffic lights that beam the laser carrying the data — essentially fibreoptic internet without the cables. Partners such as Airtel use the machines to build out communications infrastructure in hard-to-reach places.

Krishnaswamy said he had an epiphany while working on failed balloon internet project Loon, which used lasers to connect data between balloons, and brought that technology to the ground.

“We call this moon shot composting,” said Astro Teller, who leads X, where he is known as “captain of moonshots”.

X is Alphabet’s research division that takes on projects bordering on science fiction. It gave rise to self-driving technology firm Waymo, drone delivery service Wing and health tech start-up Verily Life Sciences.

“Taara is moving more data every single day than Loon did in its entire history,” said Teller.

Bharti Airtel chief technology officer Randeep Sekhon said Taara will help deliver faster internet service in urban areas in developed countries. He said it is less expensive to beam data between buildings than to bury fibreoptic cables. “I think this is really disruptive,” he said.

Krishnaswamy was recently in Osur, an Indian village three hours south of Chennai, where he spent his childhood summers, for installation of Taara equipment. Osur will receive high-speed internet for the first time this summer, he said.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of these villages across India,” he said. “I can’t wait to see how this technology can come handy to bringing all of those people online.”

Google in July 2020 committed $10bn to digitalising India. It invested $700m for a 1.28% stake in Bharti Airtel in 2022. X and Google are sister companies under Alphabet, while Taara’s partnership with Bharti Airtel is separate from the Google investment.

Asked about the downside of the internet as X and Taara push ahead with their mission to connect the rest of the world, Teller said: “I acknowledge the concept that the internet is imperfect, but I would suggest that’s maybe the subject of a different moon shot to improve the internet’s content.”

Reuters