Google parent company Alphabet and Bharti
Airtel
are teaming up to use beams of light to bring high-speed internet to remote villages in India, a report says. Known as Taara, the project is part of Alphabet’s innovation lab called X.
What is Taara?
The Taara project started in 2016 after Google’s attempt to provide internet via balloons as part of Project Loon ran into problems due to high costs, Reuters news agency quoted company executives as saying.
According to Mahesh Krishnaswamy, who is leading Taara, the project is progressing better. Taara and Airtel executives are targeting large-scale deployment of the technology in India.
Taara has also signed deals with internet provider Bluetown in India. The project is already under development in 13 countries, including Australia, Kenya and Fiji.
“We’re trying to be one of the cheapest and most affordable places to offer dollars per gigabyte to end users,” Krishnaswamy was quoted as saying.
Taara better than Loon
According to the company, Taara’s machine is the size of a traffic light, which emits the laser with the data. Put simply, Taaras Beam offers fiber optic internet without cables.
“Taara moves more data every day than Loon in its entire history,” Astro Teller, who runs X, was quoted as saying.
Airtel, in turn, will use these machines to build communications infrastructure in remote areas, such as the village of Osur near Chennai.
“Osur will get high-speed internet for the first time this summer,” said Krishnaswamy, who visited his childhood village to install Taara devices.
“There are hundreds of thousands of these villages across India. I can’t wait to see how this technology can be useful in bringing all these people online,” he was quoted as saying.
What Airtel has to say
Randeep Sekhon, Airtel’s chief technology officer, said Taara will also help provide faster internet services in urban areas in developed countries.
He emphasized that the technology is cheaper compared to buried fiber optic cable. “I think that’s really disturbing,” he was quoted as saying.
Google last year invested $700 million in a 1.28% stake in Bharti Airtel. Taara’s partnership with Airtel is independent of the Google investment, the publication said.
