Alphabet will soon deliver wireless Internet over light beams in Kenya using a technology that can cover distances of up to 20km. Alphabet's Project Taara, unveiled under a different name in 2017, conducted a series of pilots in Kenya last year and is now partnering with a telecom company to deliver Internet access in remote parts of Africa.
Kenya will get the technology first, with other countries in sub-Saharan Africa to follow. Project Taara General Manager Mahesh Krishnaswamy described the project in an announcement from Alphabet today:
Project Taara is now working with Econet and its subsidiaries, Liquid Telecom and Econet Group, to expand and enhance affordable, high-speed Internet to communities across their networks in Sub-aharan Africa.
Taara's links will begin rolling out across Liquid Telecom's networks in Kenya first, and will help provide high-speed connectivity in places where it's challenging to lay fiber cables, or where deploying fiber might be too costly or dangerous—for example over rivers, across national parks, or in post-conflict zones.
Project Taara is one of the "moonshots" developed at Alphabet's X subsidiary (formerly known as Google X). Taara grew out of X's Project Loon, which had developed a balloon-based network to cover remote areas.
As Alphabet explains, "the Loon team needed to figure out a way to create a data link between balloons that were flying over 100km apart" and thus "investigated the use of FSOC (Free Space Optical Communications) technology to establish high-throughput links between balloons.
" After using those links to send data between balloons in the stratosphere, Loon engineers wondered if they could "apply some of that science to solve connectivity problems down a little closer to Earth," and Project Taara was born.
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