Laser internet company Taara has spun off from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and is becoming independent, The Verge reports.
Taara creates terminals that transmit internet using lasers at speeds of up to 20 Gbps over distances of up to 20 km. They can be installed on towers, making this method faster and cheaper than laying fiber optics.
Alphabet will retain a minority stake in Taara, which also received funding from Series X Capital. The company, which currently has about 20 employees, is working in 12 countries on projects ranging from providing internet connectivity in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo to expanding a congested network during the 2024 Coachella festival.
Although Taara's optical technology, which uses towers, is different from Starlink's satellite approach, the company is positioning itself as a competitor in the field of connecting rural areas to the Internet.
“We can offer the end user 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it at a lower cost,” said company founder Mahesh Krishnaswamy.
Taara grew out of another Krishnaswamy project, Loon, which involved transmitting data via lasers between a network of balloons at altitudes of up to 20 miles. That project was shut down in 2021, three years after it was spun off from Alphabet.