Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will soon transmit wireless Internet in Kenya, Africa, using a technology that can cover a distance of 20 kilometers.It is reported that Alphabet's Taara project was officially released in 2017, using light beams to complete the transmission of large amounts of network data. Alphabet began a series of pilot projects in Kenya last year and is currently working with a telecommunications company to provide Internet access services to remote areas in Africa.

Kenya will adopt this technology first, and other sub-Saharan African countries will follow. Mahesh Krishnaswamy, general manager of the Taara project, said: “The Taara project is currently cooperating with Econet and its subsidiaries Liquid Telecom and Econet Group to expand affordable high-speed Internet services to the vast communities in Sub-Saharan Africa through the original service network. The Taara project will first be rolled out on the Liquid Telecom network in Kenya. It will provide high-speed Internet connections in areas where it is difficult to lay fiber optic cables or where laying fiber optic cables may be too expensive or dangerous, such as rivers, national parks and other remote areas.

Similar to optical cables, Taara's technology uses light to transmit data, but without the use of cables. Krishnaswamy said, "Like traditional optical fiber transmission of data using light, Taara technology also transmits information at a very high speed by emitting a very narrow, invisible beam. This beam is between two small Taara terminals. It forms a link for sending and receiving each other. The maximum distance of a Taara link can reach 20 kilometers, and the transmission bandwidth can reach more than 20Gbps, which is enough for thousands of users to watch YouTube videos at the same time."

"Based on the partner's optical fiber network and connecting remote areas through Taara technology, this project can provide people with high-speed, high-quality Internet services without the time, cost and trouble of laying optical cables.

Since this technology requires connections within the visible range, Alphabet will deploy the terminal "on a tower, pole or roof." Krishnaswamy writes that Taara technology can "provide a cost-effective and quickly deployable way to connect high-speed Internet to remote areas and help fill key service gaps at major access points such as cell phone towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. "Alphabet encourages other operators to contact them and deploy Taara technology to other regions. The Taara project is one of the "Moon Landing Projects" developed by Alphabet subsidiary X (formerly Google X). It originated from X's Loon project, which developed a balloon-based internet network with the purpose of covering the internet to remote areas. As Alphabet explained, "The Loon team needs to find a way to establish a data link between balloons that are more than 100 kilometers apart", so "studied the use of FSOC (Free Space Optical Communication) technology to establish a high-throughput link between balloons." The feasibility. After using this technology to send and receive data between balloons in the stratosphere, Loon engineers wondered whether they could "apply some of the scientific knowledge closer to the earth to solve the connection problem." So the Taara project was born. (Chenchen)

Source: NetEase Technology Report, translated by Google Translate