A great article over at IEEE Spectum discusses the use of free-air lasers to solve one of the continuing problems in communications — dealing with challenging paths for cable and fibre.
Getting to the ‘last mile’
You may be familiar with the ‘last mile’ problem of bringing the Internet to customers’ homes and navigating access rights across roads, through common building areas, and into highly informal home arrangements in densely populated informal settlements. Many of these situations can be solved using mobile telecommunications solutions, and by now, most people worldwide are using handheld devices and the mobile Internet as their primary connection method.
But before you even get to ‘the last mile,’ you can run into the same kinds of issues building out cable and fibre networks along specific paths from your centrally managed infrastructure to provide those mobile device signals within a radio broadcast area.
From microwave to light
One of the solutions has always been ‘go free air’. Many telecommunication providers built out networks using microwave signals in the early days of data services and carried them into the Internet era. However, the microwave spectrum allocations aren’t suitable for the higher speeds required by modern Internet, and they are often saturated with links for private data communications, government, emergency services, and the armed forces. Something else has to be used to get to 20 gigabit class speeds — light.
Using laser light-based point-to-point links isn’t ‘new’ in itself. Light signalling for the Internet has been around for a long time, but has been expensive and deployed mainly in dense urban areas. It comes with a host of problems also seen in the higher frequencies of microwave services; humidity, rain or fog, dust, smoke, tree growth, and bird life can all interfere with your signal integrity and reduce the viability of the path.
A reliable, mesh-adaptive integrated model
IEEE Spectrum interviewed Mahesh Krishnaswamy, the CEO of Taara, who came out of the Google/Alphabet ‘X Development’ process. Taara’s approach builds on the technology ideas from ‘project Loon’ — which used long-duration high-altitude balloons — as well as experience from other Google network initiatives.
Krishnaswamy and his team claim to have produced a more reliable, mesh-adaptive and highly integrated model, which has shrunk the cost footprint significantly, for free-air laser communications from under 100m up to 20km. This straddles the mixture of path problems confronting the infrastructure network burdens, and is helping resolve the delivery problem.
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