Taara started as a Google X moonshot spinoff aimed at connecting rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa with beams of light. Its newest product, debuting this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, aims at a different kind of connectivity problem: getting internet access into buildings in cities that already have plenty of fiber—just not where it’s needed.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company transmits data via infrared lasers, of the typically used in fiber optic lines. However, Taara’s systems beam gigabits across kilometers over open air. “Every one of our Taara terminals is like a digital camera with a laser pointer,” says Mahesh Krishnaswamy, Taara’s CEO. “The laser pointer is the one that’s shining the light on and off, and the digital camera is on the [receiving] side.”
Taara’s new system—Taara Beam, being demoed at MWC’s “Game Changers” platform—prioritizes efficiency and a compact size. Each Beam unit is the size of a shoebox and weighs just 7 kilograms, and can be mounted on a utility pole or the side of a building. According to the company, Beam will deliver fiber-competitive speeds of up to 25 gigabits per second with low, 50-microsecond latency.
Taara’s former parent company, Krishnaswamy says, is also these days a prominent client. The search engine giant’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif. is near a landing point for a major submarine fiber optic cable.
“One of the Google buildings was literally a few hundred meters away from the landing spot in California,” he says. “Yet they couldn’t connect the two points because of land rights and right of way issues. … Without digging and trenching into federal land, we are able to connect the two points at tens of gigabits per second. And so many Googlers are actually using our technology today.”
A Fingernail-sized Chip Shrinks Taara’s Tech
The laser pointer and digital camera analogy, Krishnaswamy adds, doesn’t quite do justice to the engineering problems the company had to tackle to fit all the gigabit-per-second photonics into a weather-hardened, shoebox-sized device.
The Taara Beam, for one, needs to steer its laser link across kilometers of open air—so that its laser can be received by the Beam device on the other end of the line. Effectively, that means the device’s laser can only be off target by no more than a few degrees.
Beam approaches the steering problem by physically shaping the laser pulse itself. Taara’s photonics chip splits the laser beam carrying the data into more than a thousand separate streams, delaying each one by a closely-controlled amount. The result is a laser wavefront that can be pointed anywhere the system directs.
Krishnaswamy makes an analogy to pebbles tossed into a pond. Dropping pebbles in a careful sequence, he says, can create interference patterns in the waves that ripple outwards. “These thousand emitters are equivalent to a thousand stones,” he says. “And I’m able to delay the phase of each of them. That allows me to steer [the wavefront] whichever direction I want it to go.”
The idea behind this technology—called a phased array—is not new. But turning it into a commercial optical communications device, at Taara Beam’s scale and range, is where others have so far fallen short.
“Radio frequency phased arrays like Starlink antennas are well known,” Krishaswamy says. “But to do this with optics, and in a commercial way, not just an experimental way, is hard.”
This isn’t how the company started out, however.
Krishnaswamy says in 2020, when the company was still a Google X subsidiary, Taara launched its first commercial product, the traffic light-sized Lightbridge. Like Beam, Lightbridge boasts fiber-like connection speeds, and it has to date been deployed in more than 20 countries around the world—including the Google campus, described above.
Taara’s upgraded model, Lightbridge Pro, launched last month and is also on display this week at MWC. Lightbridge Pro adds one crucial capability Lightbridge lacked, an automatic backup. When fog or rain disrupts Lightbridge’s optical link, the system switches traffic over to a paired radio connection. When conditions clear, Lightbridge Pro switches traffic back to the faster laser data connection. The company says that combination keeps the link up 99.999 percent of the time—less than five minutes of downtime in a year.
Both Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro mechanically position their mirrors, achieving three degrees of pointing accuracy. An onboard tracking system inside the unit also re-locks the beams automatically whenever the unit gets shifted or jostled.
The Future of Taara Beam Deployment
Krishaswamy says while the company continues to install and support Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro, he hopes the company can also begin installing Taara Beam units for select early customers as soon as later this year.
According to Mohamed-Slim Alouini—distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia—the bandwidth of free-space optical (FSO) technologies like Taara Beam and Lightbridge still leaves plenty of room to grow.
“Like any physical medium, free-space optics has a capacity limit,” Alouini says. “But laboratory experiments have already demonstrated fiber-like performance with terabits-per-second data rates over FSO links. The real gap is not in raw capacity but in practical deployment.”
Atul Bhatnagar, formerly of Nortel and Cambium Networks, and currently serving as advisor to Taara, sees room for optimism even when it comes to practical deployment.
“Current Taara architecture is capable of delivering hundreds of gigabits per second over the next several years,” he says.
Krishnaswamy adds that Beam’s compact form factor makes it suitable not just for terrestrial applications either.
“We’ll continue to do the work that we’re doing on the ground, but to the extent that space solutions are taking off we would love to be part of that,” he says. “Data-center-to-data-center in space is something we are really looking at using for this technology.
“Because when you have multiple servers up in space, you can’t run fiber from one to the other,” he adds. “But these photonics modules will be able to point and track and transmit gigabits and gigabits of data to each other.”
For now, the company’s ambitions are closer to Earth—specifically to the buildings, utility poles, and city blocks where fiber still hasn’t arrived. Which is, after all, where the company’s whole story began.
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