Alphabet’s Loon project, which aimed to provide internet via a series of balloons, was scrapped last year – but the technology involved was spun off into a startup that’s dropping the floating platforms and aiming to bring lasers and the cloud to the Provision of internet use to remote locations. The company inheriting Google’s technology is called Aalyria, and although CNBC reports that Alphabet has a minority stake in it, it will no longer 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 meant to juggle ever-changing connections. Spacetime was originally intended to predict how Loon’s balloons move and keep the connections between them strong. Now its job is to predict when a Tightbeam station (which can be either ground-based or satellite-based) will have to hand over its link to a moving object like an airplane or boat.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Aalyria is selling its software now and plans to start 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 designed to transmit data much like a fiber optic cable, beaming light from one point to another. It only happens over the air rather than a physical connection, which obviously makes it more flexible, especially over long distances. The company claims the system is shockingly fast: “100-1000x faster than anything else available today,” according to a press release. That seems to be the power of damn laser beams – although they do come with some potential reliability downsides that physical fibers don’t have, which we’ll get to in a moment. (The Dr. Evil reference comes straight from Aalyria; Bloomberg says his lab has “sculptures of sharks with laser beams on their heads.”)
Bloomberg notes that Tightbeam grew out of a Google project called Sonora, which the company hasn’t spoken about publicly. However, Alphabet had another separate Loon-related laser project that saw the light of day: Project Taara, which provided internet services in Africa using lasers originally intended to connect the balloons together.
Project Taara used these lasers, known as Free Space Optical Communications Links, to extend conventional fiber optic lines, but they could theoretically be used in places where cable runs would be impossible or complicated (e.g. crossing a ravine, a canyons or a river). ). At the time, the Taara team said the system was relatively resilient to obstacles such as haze, light rain and birds, but admitted the climate in Africa was more ideal than that of San Francisco, where fog is so constant that there is a own Wikipedia has articles.
Airborne transmission is great until other things are in the air
Aalyria says it has its own way of dealing with interference, which involves compensating for how something like rain or dust would distort or scatter the light used to transmit the data (an important consideration when using this light through the air rather than the protected strands of glass that make up fiber optic cables).
The company seems set to take over SpaceX in terms of the services it offers. According to CNBC, the company hopes its laser communications technology will be used to provide services for planes, ships, cellular connections and satellite communications. With more airwaves, Starlink is beginning to provide Wi-Fi to some airlines and cruise lines, as well as RVs and home internet customers. SpaceX is also beaming information down from space. Bloomberg notes that in some Tightbeam tests, ground stations sent a signal to planes, and the company’s website says something similar could be done for sending signals to satellites as well.
As far as improving cellular connectivity, Aalyria has a lot of competition from satellite companies like Globalstar (Apple’s partner for its recently announced satellite emergency SOS feature), SpaceX and T-Mobile, AST SpaceMobile, Lynk Global and Amazon, which has struck a deal with Verizon to provide backhaul services to remote cell towers via Project Kuiper satellites.
Right now, Aalyria is small: 26 people, according to Bloomberg. And while it has the rights to use Google’s technology, there’s a difference between creating and testing cool tech and actually selling it in the real world — something Alphabet figured out for itself with Loon’s commercial pilot service in Kenya.
Still, the idea was apparently interesting enough to attract some investors, including the US Department of Defense. Whether you’re an evil supervillain trying to polish your hideout or a corporation trying to “connect everything that exists today with everything that exists tomorrow,” as Aalyria CEO Chris Taylor opposite Bloomberg said lasers are still very effective at igniting the imagination.