Taara is now an independent company with a mission to bring high-speed, affordable and abundant connectivity to people everywhere using beams of light.
My passion for connectivity was sparked while I was applying for universities in the U.S. from an internet cafe in Chennai. Listening to the beeps and chirps of the dial up modem. I became obsessed with connectivity, and I wanted to bring its economic, educational, and social benefits to more people. Our entire Taara team shares this passion—a diverse group of manufacturing experts, telco industry veterans, optical and photonics engineers and more.
Moving to the Light Generation
The connectivity challenge is only becoming more urgent as the world’s demand for data increases. Fiber is the gold standard for high-speed connectivity, but it's often difficult to lay because it's costly, impractical or geographically impossible. Where fiber fails to reach, operators and service providers often turn to radio frequency to fill the gap. However, traditional radio frequency bands are congested and running out of available bandwidth, making it harder to support 5G expansion and keep up the growing global demand for fast, reliable connectivity.
Taara Lightbridge brings fast, fiber-like internet access to areas where it’s too difficult or expensive to install traditional fiber, like in dense city neighborhoods, over rivers and seas, or across rugged terrains and national parks. In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air, at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second and across distances up to 20 kilometers. Taara’s Lightbridge units deliver high speed, high quality internet and require only a few hours to set up, without the time and cost associated with digging trenches or stringing cables.
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By jauntywundrkind 2025-03-1718:4424 reply I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.
Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.
Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...
> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming.
I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.
But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a war if your drones/loitering munition are less effective than those of your enemies because your control signals are jammed you will give in and make your weapons find their target without that control signal. That leads to an arm race of ever more sophisticated autonomous weapons. That is scarry for many reasons, and probably a worse outcome for all of us.
On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic and ensurers that a human mind can remain in the loop. So… maybe being better at jamming resistant communication is actually better for humankind?
By proaralyst 2025-03-1810:412 reply Ukraine's drones are already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away.[0][1] They're also using drones that trail a fibre optic over several kilometres to avoid jamming.[2]
[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...
By lupusreal 2025-03-1816:29 > already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away
This capability is basically a reinvention of the walleye television bomb, which locked onto targets using edge detection on a signal from an internal television camera. 1960s technology.
Dang what does a drone carriable several kilometer fiber spool look like?
The lower canister in the last of the three links, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...
Difficult to judge scale, maybe the size of a drinks can or food can? Fiber is pretty thin.
By bprater 2025-03-1813:50 Half a can of soda. The main electronics controller visible in the photo is likely 20x20 or 30x30mm, the standard for FPV style drones.
By j245 2025-03-1813:23 Previous article has pictures
I was pretty shocked to find out that wire-guided missiles were(/are?) a thing. This seems easier than that.
By mrguyorama 2025-03-1917:51 Wire guided is still the primary means of guiding torpedos from submarines, because it gives you an unjammable, un-interceptible, consistent communication interface, and in torpedoes the wire spools out for tens of kilometers.
If you want something really cool, look up old fashioned TV guidance. We built weapons that guided based a TV signal, and edge detection in that signal. In 1958.
Pretty sure they were in the thousand feet range, not multiple kilometers…
By dwighttk 2025-03-1813:52 (Welp… 3 km range… though to me wire that long seems like it’d be easier than optical cable back in the 70s)
By red-iron-pine 2025-03-1820:59 basically like a cheapo SACLOS missle, i.e. the TOW missile, which have been using that (fiber) approach for decades now.
> On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic
I'm a bit more pessimistic than that. I think the driver for autonomy will be that the speed at which things happen on the battlefield. People being attacked with automated weapons might not be able to make response related decisions fast enough. The automation will be in place to enable a rapid response. It will become an arms race involving speed of attack and response. It will be the military equivalent of high-frequency trading, involving things like swarms and directed energy weapons.
The phrase you're looking for is OODA loop, popularized in the 80s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategi...
By dataviz1000 2025-03-187:041 reply > Boyd’s Law of Iteration: speed of iteration beats quality of iteration [0]
By ethbr1 2025-03-1814:34 Also, Patton's classic 'a good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week'
I personally won't worry until microwave ovens are regulated. I'm still sore that I didn't publish a decade ago.
By BurningFrog 2025-03-181:413 reply I got seriously terrified by reading a PKD SF story at 15 about the few surviving humans hiding from war drones still hunting people long after the war had ended.
Second Variety, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety I've commented this before but it is closer to Terminator than the Harlan Ellison story IMO.
By BurningFrog 2025-03-1821:40 It's pretty wild that PKD imagined AI controlled combat drones in 1953, and 70 years we'll soon have them.
By BurningFrog 2025-03-1815:232 reply Yeah, that was the one. Really burned itself into my mind.
The movie was OK, but you can only get shocked once.
By rstuart4133 2025-03-192:26 Haven't read the book, but I did see "Screamers". Wikipedia says: "Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies, writes that the film is more faithful than most other adaptations".
I can't comment on whether that's true, but the movie still haunts me. Odd, since as Wikipedia says "it received a mixed critical reception and failed at the box office". There was nothing mixed about my reception of it.
By stevenwoo 2025-03-1817:49 Similar but reverse, I felt unfortunate to have read the novelette after watching Terminator because part way in the story I thought - this is almost all of the AI/self replicating autonomous robot points of the Terminator movie just without the time travel. The movie addition of time travel adds a bit of hope to an otherwise totally bleak story resolution.
I haven't read that one, but it reminds me of Black Mirror's "Metalhead", which absolutely terrified me.
By yownie 2025-03-186:35 The movie Screamers (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/) is based off it, decent sci-fi.
By red-iron-pine 2025-03-1821:00 draws from the same well, intellectually. terrifying stuff, that BM episode is, too.
By lynx97 2025-03-186:01 [dead]
> Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities
They are not obvious to me. Care to explain?
By LeifCarrotson 2025-03-1812:172 reply "People with blue and yellow patches are the enemy. I won't be able to communicate with you after you leave the forward base, but you need to navigate about 1 mile southwest then kill the people you find with a blue and yellow patch for as long as you can."
Then the quadcopter/Atlas/Spot/a Terminator/a tank driven by AI starts rolling across the landscape, while humans flagged as suspicious by Google because we lack sufficient tracking data in our browsers fill out reCaptcha images that say "Select all images that contain [soldiers] in this set."
Nearby, a scared local child distracts themselves from the distant horrors by drawing a picture of the sun in the sky with their crayons.
Some time later, the robot is able to transmit back a few bytes of telemetry to base, which publishes a press release that describes the number of enemies slain.
By throwpoaster 2025-03-1812:46 This is an example of the lack of connectivity, not the horror of too much.
By ahazred8ta 2025-03-210:05 Obligatory xkcd: click on all the photos that show places you would run for shelter during a robot uprising https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2228:_Machine_Lea...
By mab122 2025-03-1812:29 > Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.
This sounds like you would also be in favor of backdoored encryption. I disagree. It's a tool / improvement like any other, how you use it makes it scary. BTW this is nothing new, it's just packaged nicely and (I assume) massively improved technology. DIY and open source solutions were possible in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA (static ones tho)
> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming
The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.
By aerostable_slug 2025-03-1722:563 reply To risk being pedantic, US SLBMs (Tridents) indeed use stellar updates for their inertial guidance system.
Our ICBMs have no update mechanism at all. Once they're out of the silo, they're completely on their own.
ICBMs would be more confident in their starting position and orientation. SLBMs would necessarily have more uncertainty in the initial conditions.
You can create nuclear load so powerful it won't matter where it hits.
By red-iron-pine 2025-03-1821:01 "close only matters in horseshoes and nuclear strikes"
By m4rtink 2025-03-1812:48 Teller, is that you ?
By BurningFrog 2025-03-181:502 reply The BM part means "Ballistic Missile", which sounds like they're basically "thrown" into a parabolic path towards their target, like a falling rock.
Or am I over-interpreting the name?
By gghffguhvc 2025-03-182:42 Have a read of how MERV part of some ICBMs works. Lots going on as far as targeting goes. Also take a look at Trident 2 which can use GPS for course correction but isn’t reliant on it.
By dreamcompiler 2025-03-184:42 That's exactly the right interpretation. You chuck them into space and after the rocket quits, Isaac Newton takes over.
Contrast hypervelocity weapons, which -- contrary to the name -- don't really go faster but they can maneuver in the atmosphere at that speed.
By beardedmoose 2025-03-183:251 reply The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.
The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
Why is this meme always pasted in to threads about missile guidance?
By michaelsbradley 2025-03-184:061 reply Because it’s a classic gag, even if it’s out of place on HN
By debugnik 2025-03-187:42 Not just an online gag, that's related to an excerpt of an alleged December 1997 issue of "Association of Air Force Missileers" on the GLCM Guidance System. Likely submitted in jest.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050514035446/http://www.afmiss...
that is so romantic. Rockets looking at the stars one last time before obliterating $cityname
By chairhairair 2025-03-180:02 I’ve got some bad news for you about modern nuclear weapons.
By dreamcompiler 2025-03-184:481 reply All fusion weapons are fission weapons first (like a few nanoseconds first).
All fission weapons are not necessarily also fusion weapons. But probably most are nowadays.
By Tuna-Fish 2025-03-186:53 Every nuclear weapon in the active US stockpile has a secondary fusion stage, the last pure fission weapons were removed from service and dismantled in 1992.
Most of the cost in a nuclear weapon is in the primary. It only makes sense to build pure fission weapons when you want very low-powered nukes for close range tactical use; the DoD has determined that don't see enough use for them to justify the upkeep of specific weapons.
By bagels 2025-03-183:47 The fission primary is used to trigger a secondary fusion reaction in modern weapons.
By graevy 2025-03-180:05 h-bombs do both
By juancampa 2025-03-182:07 fission + fusion
By red-iron-pine 2025-03-1821:02 i've been to $cityname many times. there are lot of available single women there near me in $cityname
This form of navigation is probably only accurate enough for nuclear weapons, you’re not going to get meter-Range CEPs with that. You probably have to select a city you want to hit.
By aerostable_slug 2025-03-1723:021 reply This is a very good read on the state of the art when it comes to submarine-launched missile accuracy, which are presently inertially guided with a stellar update during flight.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
Thanks for the link, very interesting. So CEP is estimated to be around 100m. Better than I thought but I wouldn’t call it hitting a specific house yet.
By ants_everywhere 2025-03-181:222 reply What do you consider the primary benefit of pinpointing a particular house in nuclear war?
That’s why I said the guidance is only really usable for nuclear weapons. I wasn’t saying the guidance is bad, I was saying it’s not accurate to a few meters.
By ants_everywhere 2025-03-1817:17 Oh you're right, my bad. I got lost in the conversation and looking into the types of guidance systems and I forgot that was your original point.
By Game_Ender 2025-03-182:341 reply I don’t know if it matters now but at some point certain targets were hardened to near misses of certain sizes but not direct strikes. So the better your accuracy the smaller the weapon (or fewer) you can use to take out those targets.
So you could say the use would be increased certainty your enemies command and control and other bunkers would be destroyed increasing the odds of “winning” whatever happens afterwards.
By layla5alive 2025-03-185:04 There is no "winning" in global thermonuclear war... :/
While you probably can't target a cigarette butt on the street, you could definitely hit a building. Especially if the ICBM is paired with image recognition (which it has already for star nav) and/or backup positioning mechanisms like cell tower locations or well-known broadcasting tower locations (think television stations).
An ICBM is coming in at hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase, you’re not going to guide it anywhere using cell tower signals. The guidance is done much earlier.
And I would doubt image recognition for ground features would make it that accurate, too. Before reentry, you’re very high and fast and reentry isn’t that predictable to get you accurate enough to hit a house. And during reentry, you’re not going to see anything though plasma. And after reentry, you probably don’t have enough time and control authority to still guide into a specific house.
ICBM guidance is very different from cruise missiles.
By alienthrowaway 2025-03-1723:33 > An ICBM is coming in at hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase, you’re not going to guide it anywhere using cell tower signals.
Hypersonic glide ICBMs have been successfully tested by China, and are under development in the US, so it's entirely possible to maneuver, and optionally guide them in the terminal, though perhaps not advisable on a jammable channel, except perhaps as an anti-radiation weapon.
By datadrivenangel 2025-03-1723:32 Yeah that would work for drones and slow cruise missiles but not ICBMs.
By twobitshifter 2025-03-181:44 well there is this now as well - you don’t need to use the stars when you already have detailed aerial images of the earth - https://www.spectacularai.com/gps-free
By Galatians4_16 2025-03-183:45 Down to the Planck scale?
By freddie_mercury 2025-03-185:04 This makes me wonder how many fake stars an adversary would have to put up (and for how long?) in order to confuse a celestial navigation system.
By charliebwrites 2025-03-1722:142 reply Damn guess we have to blow up the stars
…you know, for defense
By rapind 2025-03-1722:53 Swarms to block the cameras maybe?
At this point though, couldn’t you just blow up your own country and thus accelerate warming so much as to doom the rest of humanity in a dozen years? I might have read the wrong article on that though so don’t quote me.
By charliebwrites 2025-03-183:261 reply They still owe me some cake
By quinndexter 2025-03-186:52 I have terrible news regarding said cake.
I think you're too late. Pretty sure the military has line-of-sight free-space-optics to satellites since at least the second Iraq war.
One can only wonder how small the "receivers" (routers, really) have gotten by now.
By rhubarbtree 2025-03-1721:461 reply Cubesats carry laser comms if that's what you mean.
By echoangle 2025-03-1722:47 Those work in vacuum though so you need a bit less laser power. The atmosphere attenuates your signal if you’re doing ground to ground or ground to aircraft links so you probably need a bit more laser power. But I agree that that’s probably not the difficult thing about the whole system.
By walrus01 2025-03-1722:00 Free space optics were attempted extensively in the ISP space 15, 20 years ago for FDD 1 Gbps links at short distances roof to roof in major metro areas, they're EXTREMELY vulnerable to falling over in rain/snow conditions, and path length limitations, compared to 71 to 86 GHz millimeter wave (using a 2000 MHz wide FDD channel going each way in a high/low split). I'm very skeptical.
By lutherqueen 2025-03-1718:501 reply How is better communication scary for military? The weapons themselves are
By FlyingBears 2025-03-1720:271 reply Jam resistant comms are critical for drones, and other precision weapons and their infrastructure. Even if line of sight is interrupted modern drones can return to signal nowadays, relay information, and return to target with corrections. You may not need optical cable anymore
By HeatrayEnjoyer 2025-03-1722:302 reply I expect drones will become fire-and-forget in two to three years. They won't be jammable because the pilot is in the drone.
By IncreasePosts 2025-03-1723:562 reply Missiles generally go from point A and then blow up point b. Are there any missiles that leave base, fly around for a bit trying to identify targets, and if they can't identify any targets then return home?
I said that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the line between "drone" and "missile" seems to have gotten pretty blurry with the Ukraine war featuring FPV drones holding a hand grenade that are effectively a human-piloted missile.
Some modern missiles can fly around to identify targets, but they can't return home. They can blow up harmlessly if nothing is a target, though. They can also dodge and weave the way FPV pilots do.
Obviously, "drone" has a much more expansive mission profile than "missile."
Missle is a projectile, propelled by rocket motor. Drone is an aircraft vehicle, capable of transporting explosives or whatever. There is a fat line between drone and a missile, there are different in everything: control, speed, trajectory, weight, flying principles. I don't know how you can say they are even close. Just because both fly and do boom? Then you can say there is a thin line between cow launched from catapult and a missile.
By inkcapmushroom 2025-03-1814:06 A cow launched from a catapult is indeed a missile, if we want to be pedantic.
By robin_reala 2025-03-189:16 Cruise missiles are missiles without rockets.
By timerol 2025-03-1814:04 The term you're looking for is loitering munitions. From Wikipedia: "Some loitering munitions may return and be recovered by the operator if they are unused in an attack and have enough fuel"
By stirfish 2025-03-182:04 You are describing cruise missiles
LOS communications has been around for a long time now in the form of microwave towers. [1]
But further, jamming is still doable, just not with a portable electronic device. Stir up some dust and all the sudden coms are down.
I was doing communications in military. For temporary networks, we used microwave links and they requires line of sight. The reason to use direct link is that missiles can be easily targeted to any radio source you can hear and take down the network.
By cogman10 2025-03-1722:56 Yeah, I was aware of this because of work with telecommunications in rural locations. Nobody is burying a cable over a mountain, that's too expensive and too much work. So instead, they'll setup microwave towers. Being on a mountain has the benefit that you are already in elevated locations that are easy to shoot a phone signal across the range.
By XorNot 2025-03-187:01 It's worth noting that free space laser comms would also have this problem though: the atmosphere has dust, and any IR detector will see bloom and reflection of dust from a laser which will draw a straight line right back to the emitter.
Shoot a laser pointer at the receiver and there's a good chance you have jammed the thing.
so you have a laser and want to jam the comms channel. How do you find where the comms channel is, where is the receiver, where do you point your laser to jam enemy comms?
I agree it is not an easy task. But lasers can be detected with the right equipment (think the classic "laser through fog" but happening to plain air molecules), unit movements can be tracked and straight sight line is a significant logistical restriction.
But if they were only receiving. Well, that's going to be pretty hard to confirm and even if you "jam" it, then so what?
By Tuna-Fish 2025-03-187:01 > But lasers can be detected with the right equipment (think the classic "laser through fog" but happening to plain air molecules)
You are assuming that the only source emitting at the specific wavelength is the laser you are targeting. This is not how it would work, the side using laser comms would also fly decoy drones that bathe the sky in the same wavelength as the comms channel.
This is also key part of how LPI radars on stealth aircraft work. Yes, in a spherical cow in vacuum environment you can in principle always trace a radar signal back to its source. But add a whole bunch MALDs radiating on the same band as the radars, and suddenly it becomes impossible to pinpoint the sources.
Should the military not have internet? If laser based internet is better than satellite or microwave or wireless (I assume the military uses these three). Then isn't that good?
That's the interesting paradox of technological development. If it's out of the bag, then it's out of bag, but that cuts both ways. You can never control who will gain access to advancements. Even if you trust the custodians now, you don't know who they will be in the future, &c. Eventually you end up at a fork: either pursue and endless technological arms race or find some way to build lasting cooperative and peaceful relationships. As they say, the surest way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend. Still a massive challenge, but presumably that's why empires eventually always fail. They don't know how to make friends.
By LoganDark 2025-03-1723:28 > As they say, the surest way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend.
Defeat, not destroy. The best way to defeat an enemy is to make them your friend. Destroying someone would not be very friendly (unless they want to be destroyed).
By dzhiurgis 2025-03-181:08 You cannot control, but you can backdoor
By ashoeafoot 2025-03-1721:39 There are no warrior cultures in space.
By cameldrv 2025-03-1723:25 This is something the U.S. military has been working on for some time. I know of at least one project that's very advanced: https://www.ga-asi.com/multi-mission-payloads/lac12-pod
By eptcyka 2025-03-186:10 What specifically are you worried about? Better comms will always help people, be it to flourish more in peace or more efficiently killing one another. Most inventions in the 20th century either came from the military or ended up being used by the military.
By baq 2025-03-189:50 Why afraid? It's obvious it'll be used, nothing to be afraid, more like expect it to. Mount a base station on an AWACS and you've got the whole theatre covered. Clouds are an issue, obviously.
At the same time, fibre-optic drones have being successfully fielded by Russia and now increasingly by Ukraine. Immune to jamming with a minimum range of 10km.
There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree.
https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/08/ukraine-fiber-optic-dr...
By looofooo0 2025-03-188:59 There is also some very recent advances to laser communication, which explains the increased interest: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01201-7
By sorokod 2025-03-1721:51 Something similar was available since the previous century for ship to ship communications where there is a line of sight.
Such communications can't be intercepted or triangulated.
By reaperducer 2025-03-1722:05 I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.
They've probably had it for decades. Laser communication was being used by commercial TV stations in the U.S. in the 1990's. WNBC-TV in New York used a laser to transmit video from its Manhattan skyline camera in New Jersey back to 30 Rock.
I have a vague notion that it didn't work great in all weather conditions, but it was a long time ago.
By dreamcompiler 2025-03-184:56 Not necessarily. Depends on the wavelength.
By pclmulqdq 2025-03-1722:51 There's already military usage of similar devices. I wouldn't be surprised if Taara has a supplier that also supplies several militaries.
By mtud 2025-03-1813:10 The U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) has been deploying this tech - free space optics (FSO) - for about a decade.
https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=555...
By FuriouslyAdrift 2025-03-1816:40 Militaries have been using point to point laser or microwave for things for decades. They've also used coiled fiber optics (and still do) for missles, etc.
It's really easy to blast an area with high power disruptive radiation (EFI, RFI, laser, etc.) to deny comms, though.
By tootie 2025-03-1813:25 Hasn't this been possible with microwaves for a long time? I remember site-to-site microwave Internet between tall buildings being used commercially in the 1990s
By pyinstallwoes 2025-03-189:17 Given any tech, assume the military already has it. In fact, assume any tech that is public is approved by military for public use.
By nine_k 2025-03-1723:37 Laser light can be dispersed or bent by atmosphere and whatever is suspended in it, like smoke or drizzle. Also, it needs precise targeting.
I can assume that laser links work wonderfully in outer space.
On land or sea, I can imagine using tactical smoke generators to disrupt laser links and visual navigation, giving an advantage to to systems that use e.g. microwaves for "vision", and radio channels for communication.
Also, why are you afraid of this development?
By bozhark 2025-03-188:54 Line of sight is not immune to jamming, in fact it’s susceptible to more.
Physically.
By yieldcrv 2025-03-181:07 traders have done this across cities for a long time
Wait until military people put the receiver on their chest.
Then all the military dramas will flip from "sniper acquired target" to "communication with friendlies reestablished"
Sounds like a nice way to do IFF. Optical transponder. Only responds on a valid challenge received.
By fc417fc802 2025-03-184:49 > Only responds on a valid challenge received.
Perhaps I misunderstand but that sounds like a scary failure mode.
By EvanAnderson 2025-03-1718:273 reply RONJA[0] with lasers? >smile<
Free space optics always seemed like a neat idea. For space-based communication, particularly if your "mission" involves as little stray emission as possible, I would think free space optics would be a win.
I would assume there's more error correction, but otherwise I wonder how dramatically this differs from modulating light on a fiber. It seems like a similar problem.
By proxysna 2025-03-1723:21 Exactly my first thought. Had this link in my bookmarks for an eternity. http://images.twibright.com/tns/1208.html
By FuriouslyAdrift 2025-03-1816:53 Intersting... my physics class in high school (late 80s) made an RF modulated laser transmission system for sending analog video between two buildings a few miles apart. It worked great. I didn't think it was that big of a deal at the time since we had already done microwave and other frequencies.
By looofooo0 2025-03-188:46 There have been some recent advances which greatly improved the optical bandwidth and make such projects much more feasible cost wise: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01201-7
Single digit amount of photons is needed per bit.
This section from the marketing blurb doesn't sound too promising:
When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime.
In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.
By mattlondon 2025-03-1718:382 reply Some of their use-case they are crowing about on their site cover temporary things: back haul for major-but-temporary events, tethered-drone-mounted units for emergency disaster recover where a cell site is taken out etc. Those are the sorts of things where laying fibre 20km for use for just a day or two just isn't going to happen, but a temporary laser link that you can get up and running in a hour or two would be great.
By lelandbatey 2025-03-180:233 reply What kind of data rates and distances are they talking about that isn't served by existing products? For example, you can buy a 20km range, 2Gbps wireless point to point link for a flat $3000 today: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wireless-airfiber-ptp/pr...
What they mention in the article is up to 20Gbps, but they'd have to be pretty dang cheap to out compete just buying 10 of the existing options.
By cycomanic 2025-03-180:48 The issue is that you can't put 10 of your 2 Gbps wireless links next to each other. You quite possibly end up with < 2 Gbps as interference kills your signals (unless you put the transceivers so far apart from one another that you sort of defeat the purpose). That said there are other wireless solutions that can get you > 10 Gbps over > 20 km already (not sure about 20 Gbps, but I wouldn't be surprised). The issue is available spectrum, i.e. you can't just setup the link, because the spectrum doesn't belong to you. Not a problem for optics.
By gmoot 2025-03-180:43 Elsewhere in the thread it suggests ~$30k for one link. Which is exactly in line with buying 10 of the ubiquiti devices.
But I think you would need 20 of them, 10 on each end? Plus extra install, networking equipment, etc. Which would make Taara significantly better.
By mattlondon 2025-03-1818:44 Competition is a good thing. Perhaps now those 3000USD devices will need to be less expensive to remain competitive?
By delulu42 2025-03-1718:41 [dead]
That's not the market they're going for though. They're more of a competitor to Starlink
There's also obvious applications to places where weather is more predictable. There's plenty of areas and small towns in the Great Basin region that have basically no internet. This would be a quick and easy way to set those places up with internet with more reliability than something like starlink
By pdabbadabba 2025-03-1722:12 But why would these not be places already served by terrestrial wireless internet service providers? It seems like it would be much easier and generally more attractive to serve locations like this using, for example, 5 GHz.
Normally, the lack of (near) line-of-sight is one of the biggest limiting to those sorts of deployments, but that would also have to be solved for any place being served with FSO.
The problem with selling inferior technologies is that sooner or later people are going to stop using them (even in the Grad Basin region). Not exactly a recipe for success.
By culi 2025-03-1914:39 What are you labelling inferior here? Both Taara and Starlink?
Yes, both of those are inferior to wired infrastructure but they clearly have their usecases. If you were to start a mining project that lasts a few months or even a few years but is expected to eventually be finished and packed up, Taara seems like exactly what you need.
It can also outcompete Starlink because it won't require us to constantly replace decaying satellites. Also means less space debris pollution which is increasingly becoming a huge concern
By walrus01 2025-03-1722:13 a point to point terrestrial bridge large piece of equipment that costs $5,000+, needs a professional to install it, and works on either free space optics or V-band or E-band radio is not in any way a competitor to starlink. It's more a place to take a 1 to 10 Gbps ethernet connection as a link between two towers or roofs that can 'see' each other as an alternative to where laying fiber may be cost prohibitive or would take too long to build (or both).
Assuming this thing doesn't utterly fail in rain at a moderate distance, this would be something you use to feed a POP which then redistributes service to end users by some totally other technology (5/6 GHz band PTMP radio system, GPON, XGSPON, G.fast on copper, docsis3/docsis3.1, etc)
By refulgentis 2025-03-1718:377 reply It's interesting at 36 to look back at what I think would disrupt connectivity a decade ago:
- Google Fiber (it wasn't possible to do it cheaper than incumbents, so it devolved to standard incumbent x why would 40% margin company invest billions to get Comcast's peak profit margin of ~15% profit)
- Starry Internet (too expensive to build out, I have it and it's good, but the company certainly didn't scale)
- 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around why this would work at all, sounds like a more-susceptible-to-bad-conditions version of Starry.
I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.
By Workaccount2 2025-03-1719:022 reply The key breakthrough for 5G was allowing ~10x the number of devices to connect to a node compared to 4G. 5G is what allowed the toppling of data caps that was by far the #1 consumer complaint for years. 4G just couldn't handle heavy loads well, so data caps were needed to constrain demand.
Teleco's aren't going to say this out load, but it's the real reason why they were so celebratory about 5G, despite it coming off like just a renamed 4G to the average user.
Why would they not be loud about it? I think "We've built out 5G so we can get rid of your data caps!" is a message any telecom would want to broadcast out, unless I'm missing something
By conception 2025-03-1721:40 They don’t want to get rid of your data caps. They want to get rid of their data bandwidth limitations.
> 4G just couldn't handle heavy loads well, so data caps were needed to constrain demand.
In many parts of the world uncapped data has been the norm since around GPRS.
Could that be because they aren’t as densely populated by users so even if everyone with a phone has no data cap, they won’t overload the network? Which countries were that for example?
basically every european country? they've all had much larger datacaps than north america for years preceding 5g and most are quite densely inhabited.
I’m from Germany and I don’t know a single person with unlimited mobile data. That’s very rare here.
And yet probably everyone you know in EU has a cheaper Internet per GB that folks in the US. I have 2 SIM cards, one provider charges me $10/GB, while the other has a 2-GB packet for $6.
By jampekka 2025-03-1812:16 In Finland I pay 20€/mo for unlimited data (bandwidth capped at 200 Mbps). With some shopping around it can be cheaper/have more bandwidth. The pricing has been similar at least since 3g. And I recall having a similar deal in the UK five years ago.
There's also 28 GB EU roaming per month included, and 2.23€/GB after that.
Both of those prices are considerably more expensive than what I pay for service in the US. Even the cheaper one is more than 2x more expensive than what I pay per gig, including unlimited calls and texts + roaming to a lot of North America.
Mint. 15GB for $20/mo works out to $1.33/GB while your 2GB plan is $3/GB.
But there are other MVNOs out there like tello which also have a 2GB/$6 plan in the US, and other MVNOs which offer unlimited data for like $25-30/mo like visible and US Cellular.
Plenty of cheap MVNOs out there these days.
By bialpio 2025-03-1818:01 Tello is actually what I use for my secondary data, Fi is my main (mostly because I travel somewhat and the data costs the same in all the destinations I care about without having to juggle SIM cards).
I'm not a good case study because I rarely use more than 2gb in a month, so Mint would come closer to $10 a gig... :)
By marliechiller 2025-03-1815:53 £10/month pay as you go SIM for 30gb here in the UK and im sure there are better offers
By johncalvinyoung 2025-03-1723:31 As I deployed Starlink in an extremely obstructed spot last year for a few weeks, where multi-second dropouts were quite common... it impressed me JUST HOW MANY satellites they have up there, and just how usable my dish was despite only having ~60% of its field of view clear. It's switching satellites much more often than every five minutes.
The built-in obstruction mapping tool quickly demonstrated that though each satellite represents a tiny slice of sky... over the course of the day you're seeing a vast number of satellites at a high variety of spatial angles and orbits.
I wouldn't recommend that obstructed situation to anyone (and it's going in a much clearer location this coming summer) but the users I was supporting reported it a far far better solution than the 4G LTE they'd been depending on prior. Not a patch on fiber, but a great solution for an awkwardly remote property.
> I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.
That is not a correct understanding for how the Starlink network behaves today[0]. While I can't speak for using it outside of the U.S., I have not faced any interruptions outside of a few times during very severe weather.
[0] in the early days of the constellation, there were sub-second or a few second drops when there was no satellite overhead. But this dropped off very quickly once the constellation size increased.
By refulgentis 2025-03-1719:25 I see, tyty (been wondering for quite some time)
By iam-TJ 2025-03-188:24 For Starlink the User Terminal (antenna a.k.a. "Dishy") is a phased array. It tracks the satellite as it passes from west to east. Each satellite is in view for around 15 seconds - the phased array instantly flips from east to west and acquires the new in-view satellite in microseconds. There's no degradation in almost all 'flips' especially if the U.T. has an unobstructed view of the sky.
From my perspective, Google Fiber 100% disrupted connectivity - it woke the incumbents up and made them offer competitive Fiber. In that sense, they succeeded! My last three connections from my last three ISPs have all been gigabit (one of which was Google Fiber, easily the best internet I've ever had). I think they're expanding again, too, though I wish they had stayed as aggressive with rollout as they started.
By refulgentis 2025-03-1719:25 That's a really good point, back home, Verizon didn't bother with Fios investment until then.
By jerlam 2025-03-1719:41 Ironically, Google Fiber purchased a wireless provider - Webpass - back in 2016 which is deployed in parallel to their fiber offerings.
> 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)
I'm guessing this is a US thing? In Europe, 5G is definitely faster while latency is on par with 4G. YMMMV between EU countries though.
By refulgentis 2025-03-1719:272 reply You're right, it's definitely better than 4G, my wording was unclear, more in the sense of "Would I make this my home ISP?" than "how did 5G go?" (I would have thought cell providers would have 20-30% of the market now, ah, the follys of youth...)
By vel0city 2025-03-183:49 TBH I think a lot of it is many people still don't understand the product or misunderstand their actual needs/usage. Plenty of "normie" households can easily meet all their needs with a decent 5G fixed wireless install. As we see more cord cutting we'll probably see continued growth in fixed wireless.
FWIW, most other ISP types are treading water in terms of overall subscribers while the only real growth overall in new subscribers is fixed wireless. Your gut probably wasn't wrong that fixed wireless will probably grab 20-30%+, but just timescale-wise off a bit.
https://www.opensignal.com/2024/06/06/5g-fixed-wireless-acce...
By TheSpiceIsLife 2025-03-1723:21 5G home internet is the preferred in Australia where fibre isn’t present.
Even at my house where I have FTTH, my mobile 5G connection is persistently faster and quicker, that is both bandwidth and latency are superior on my phone from my home location.
Of course, the pricing is structured so you’re better off paying for both, either fixed internet plus mobile phone plane, or fixed 5G and mobile phone plan, depending on what is available at any specific location, but typically not all three options.
Thank you centrally planned infrastructure.
It's crazy that almost every house is able to be attached to a pipe carrying high pressure water that will flood if it is broken or attached wrong, thick wire carrying high current that will shock you, a pipe containing explosive gas, and a six inch cast iron pipe full of poop, but adding one more connection to a tiny thin strand of glass wrapped in plastic is too expensive.
By calebio 2025-03-186:55 A lot of the houses that don't currently have modern high speed internet access also don't have water pipes and sewer pipes. They have wells or water collection/delivery and septic tanks.
Electricity and twisted pair phone line is really all that's been pulled to their property.
By slowtrek 2025-03-1718:45 "... very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber."
You end up learning this in your own home. Some things are fine with a wired ethernet connection, it's really only my laptop and phone that use wifi.
By adrianmonk 2025-03-1718:421 reply You can say the same thing about running wired ethernet to your TV in the living room. It's simpler and more reliable than wifi. But wifi is much easier and quicker to install. Which one do most people use?
For most users (me included), there is zero difference in user experience between using wifi or Ethernet for their TV. Otherwise, running wired Ethernet would probably be a lot more popular.
By TeMPOraL 2025-03-1721:17 So you think. You may be right, but most users won't even realize that a good chunk of their "buffering" / "Internet is slow today" / "Netflix is broken today" problems might just be a WiFi issue, and it would go away if they used a wired connection.
By darksaints 2025-03-1718:331 reply Optical fiber is absolutely the simplest and best option for almost any form of long distance connectivity. Maybe this technology will become cost/performance competitive in about 15 years after the HFT firms have invested billions trying to extract an extra cent out of our financial markets.
By idkwhatever 2025-03-1718:42 [dead]
By gymbeaux 2025-03-185:49 The economic burden usually falls on governments, so, like StarLink, Alphabet is probably hoping for some of that sweet, sweet government subsidy/grants for military applications.
