Shoebox-Size Laser Device Beams Internet at 25 Gigabits

Google employees are streaming, downloading, and video conferencing thanks to invisible laser beams shooting across their California campus. The same technology is now small enough to fit in a shoebox and could solve internet access problems in cities worldwide.

Taara, a company that started as a Google X moonshot project, has created a laser-based internet system that transmits data at speeds up to 25 gigabits per second through open air. Their newest product, Taara Beam, weighs just 7 kilograms and mounts easily on buildings or utility poles.

The technology solved a problem Google itself faced at its Mountain View headquarters. One building sat just a few hundred meters from a major submarine fiber-optic cable landing point, but land rights and federal regulations made connecting them impossible. Taara's laser link now bridges that gap at tens of gigabits per second.

At the heart of Taara Beam sits a fingernail-size chip that performs an elegant trick with light. The chip splits a single laser beam into more than a thousand separate streams, delaying each one by a precisely controlled amount. This creates a wavefront that can be steered across kilometers of open air with pinpoint accuracy.

CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy compares it to dropping pebbles in a pond in a careful sequence. The ripples create interference patterns that can be directed wherever needed. While the concept of phased arrays exists in radar technology like Starlink dishes, turning it into a commercial optical device at this scale is groundbreaking.

The system keeps its laser pointed within a few degrees of accuracy across kilometers, essentially connecting two points with invisible light. When fog or rain disrupts the connection, Taara's larger Lightbridge Pro model automatically switches to a backup radio connection, maintaining service 99.999 percent of the time.

The Ripple Effect

Taara has already deployed its systems in more than 20 countries, connecting communities that would otherwise wait years for traditional fiber installation. Cities with plenty of existing fiber infrastructure but missing that crucial last connection now have an option that requires no digging, no trenches, and no lengthy permit battles.

Mohamed-Slim Alouini, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, notes that laboratory experiments have already achieved terabits-per-second data rates over free-space optical links. The gap isn't in what's possible but in making the technology practical and deployable at scale.

Taara plans to begin installing Beam units for early customers later this year. For buildings separated by bureaucracy instead of distance, help is literally a beam of light away.