Alphabet Spins Out Taara To Challenge Musk’s Starlink

Alphabet this week has revealed another ‘moonshot’ connectivity project, after it spun out Taara as an independent entity.

Taara CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy announced this week that “the Taara team is graduating from The Moonshot Factory to become an independent company.”

“We’ve raised a round of funding led by Series X Capital to deploy and scale Taara’s groundbreaking new approach to wireless optical communications, which uses light to deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances,” Krishnaswamy wrote.

Taara Connect

This is not the first time that Alphabet has developed internet connectivity projects.

Google Fiber for example began life as a moonshot project back in 2010, but soon developed into a commercial business in certain parts of the United States.

And let’s not forget Google’s Project Loon, which had utilised high altitude balloons for high speed connectivity in rural locations. But Alphabet announced in January 2021 that Project Loon was to be shut down.

Now Alphabet has spun out Taara as an independent company, although it is reported that Alphabet will retain a minority stake.

Taara CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy admitted in the blog post that Taara was “inspired by Loon’s breakthrough work establishing connectivity between two stratospheric balloons, our philosophy building Taara has always been to take technology out of the lab and test it with partners to learn as quickly as possible.”

“From beaming connectivity over the world’s deepest river, to deploying in densely populated neighbourhoods, every pilot project and every partnership has helped bring us closer to overcoming the stubborn connectivity gaps that prevent nearly 3 billion people from accessing the internet,” Krishnaswamy wrote.

Taara currently has two dozen employees and operates in 12 countries.

Data demand

Krishnaswamy explained that the connectivity challenge is only becoming more urgent as the world’s demand for data increases.

“Fibre is the gold standard for high-speed connectivity, but it’s often difficult to lay because it’s costly, impractical or geographically impossible,” he wrote. “Where fibre fails to reach, operators and service providers often turn to radio frequency to fill the gap. However, traditional radio frequency bands are congested and running out of available bandwidth, making it harder to support 5G expansion and keep up the growing global demand for fast, reliable connectivity.”

Taara’s current tech uses narrow light beams to transmit information through the air, at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second, and across distances up to 20 kilometres (or 12.4 miles).

Taara’s Lightbridge units deliver high speed, high quality internet and require only a few hours to set up on towers, without the time and cost associated with digging trenches or stringing cables under ground or water, for those hard to reach locations.

Starlink competitor?

Terra’s Krishnaswamy wrote the firm has “already deployed hundreds of links in more than a dozen countries. We’re delivering commercial service in partnership with Airtel, Liquid Intelligent Technologies and Liberty Networks, as well as pioneering new approaches to wireless optical communications deployments with the likes of T-Mobile and Vodafone.”

And while Taara’s tower-based optical technology works differently to Starlink’s satellites, Mahesh Krishnaswamy reportedly touted it as a possible rival for Elon Musk’s Starlink.

“We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost,” he told Wired.

Project Loon

Krishnaswamy admitted that Taara was inspired by Google’s other moonshot experiment, Project Loon.

Project Loon had first been developed by Google back in 2011, with the aim of beaming high speed internet connections via laser into hard to reach locations via balloons in the upper atmosphere.

During its life, Project Loon did achieve some limited commercial uptake.

In July 2020 for example Project Loon was approved by the Kenyan government to provide 4G connectivity via high altitude balloons into large rural regions of Kenya.

In May 2020, Loon also signed a deal with South African mobile operator Vodacom to deliver high speed internet into two rural provinces in Mozambique from the upper atmosphere.

Prior to that Project Loon was used by American telecom operators to provide connectivity to more than 250,000 people in Puerto Rico after a hurricane in 2017.

Project Loon was also used to restore Internet in Peru after the earthquake there in 2017 and was also tested in countries such as Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Although Alphabet closed down Project Loon in 2021, it effectively lives on, as Loon’s lasers have been repurposed for Taara’s towers.

Loon’s technology has also found another home in Aalyria, which was spun out of Alphabet in September 2022 as an independent company.

Aalyria focuses on co-ordinating satellite and airborne mesh networks, as Aalyria’s advanced networking and laser communications technologies are “capable of orchestrating and managing the most complex networks in the world, and extending them to places where there is no connectivity infrastructure – at an exponentially greater scale and speed than anything that exists today.”