Alphabet’s laser-Internet system has sent 700TB of data with 99. 9% uptime

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  A Project Taara transmitter.

Google’s parent company}, Alphabet, is still experimenting with hooking up remote towns to the Internet via frickin’ laser beams. Today, Alphabet’s moonshot “X Lab” shared an update on Project Taara, its experimental point-to-point optical communication system, often described as “fiber optics without the fiber. ” The company built a working installation in Africa and has been blasting a 20Gbps link about 5 km across the Congo River to a town of millions of people, lowering the cost of Internet access for them.

The Taara laser beam is bridging the gap between Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are on opposite sides of the Congo River. Brazzaville has decent Web, but because nobody wanted to run a fiber line through the particular world’s deepest and second-fastest river, Kinshasa uses a fiber line that runs 400 km around the river, and the Internet is five times more expensive there. Alphabet’s 20Gbps commercial link has been up and running for 20 days now, and the company says it has served nearly 700TB of data in that time, with 99. 9 percent uptime.

Taara was born out of the “Loon” World wide web balloon project launched in 2017 . Originally, Google was building flying cell towers to beam down the Net from the sky (over RF), but for balloon-to-balloon backhaul, typically the company was planning communications through laser beam. Space X just started doing something similar by equipping its Starlink satellites with space lasers for optical intra-satellite communication. Sky- and space-based laser communication carries the benefit of there not being much that can get in the way of a point-to-point optical beam. Ground-based lasers have more interference to consider, since they have to deal with nearly everything: rain, fog, birds, and once, according to Alphabet’s blog post, “a curious monkey. ”