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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. 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.
Aalyria 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. 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.
According to a report from Bloomberg, Aalyria is selling its software now and plans on selling Tightbeam hardware next year. In theory, the two could work together or separately — Spacetime isn’t just limited to laser-based systems.
Tightbeam is meant to transmit data in much the same way as a fiber optic cable, beaming light from one point to another. It’s just doing it through the air instead of over a physical connection, which obviously makes it more flexible, especially over long distances. The company claims that the system is shockingly fast: “100-1000x faster than anything else available today,” according to a press release. 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 Dr. Evil reference comes straight from Aalyria; Bloomberg says its lab has “sculptures of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.”)
Bloomberg notes that Tightbeam was spun out of a Google project called Sonora, which the company didn’t publicly talk about. 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.
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). 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.
Source: TheVerge
