Alphabet is spinning out laser-based internet company Taara from its “moonshot” incubator, hoping to turbocharge the start-up that provides high-bandwidth services to hard-to-reach areas in competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink network of satellites.

Taara is the latest project to spring from X — Alphabet’s experimental hub that produced artificial intelligence lab Google Brain and Waymo’s self-driving cars — and has its origins in a concept called Loon.  That envisaged shooting beams of light between thousands of balloons floating on the edge of space to provide phone and internet services across remote areas. Loon was wound up in 2021 because of political and regulatory hurdles to flying the balloons and the difficulty of servicing the 20-mile-high equipment.

However, its lasers found a second life on Taara’s towers under engineer Mahesh Krishnaswamy. The technology works by firing a beam of light the width of a pencil from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, using a system of sensors, optics and mirrors to fix it on a 1.5 inch receiver.

Alphabet says the system can transmit data at 20 gigabits per second over 20km, extending traditional fiber-optics networks with minimal construction and lower costs.

Based in Sunnyvale near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Taara has two dozen staff and is hiring aggressively. The start-up has secured backing from Series X Capital and Alphabet will retain a minority stake, but the company refused to disclose any details about its seed funding or financial targets.

Musk’s satellites use radio signals that transmit a limited amount of bandwidth to a fixed area, so more people in that space means a smaller amount of signal available to each one, slowing overall speeds. That makes Starlink most effective in remote areas or on cruise ships and in airlines, but it is unable to compete with wired fiber- or light-based systems in cities at its current capacity.

Moreover, Taara terminals can be strapped to poles, trees or buildings in hours rather than being blasted into space on rockets and there are no politicized auctions of radio spectrum to navigate. The laser beams can criss-cross without the interference that radio frequencies suffer from. “Connectivity is a pretty big problem . . . there’s still 3bn people left behind” said Krishnaswamy of the rivalry with Starlink. “I actually think there’s a lot of room for both of us.” For more on this, read the full Financial Times report.

You could learn much more about Taara here.