Google Is Developing Technology to Deliver Internet Via Light Bridges

Google just had a lightbulb moment, and it might move internet access out of the (literal) dark ages. Over at the company’s moonshot factory X, researchers have developed a chip that they believe should enable us to deliver high-speed internet access via beams of light, opening up the possibility of making all those underground cables we currently rely on a thing of the past.

The project that Google has been working on is code-named Taara, and the team working on it announced on Friday a new, next-generation chip that it believes can make light-based, high-speed internet a reality. The new Taara chip is a “silicon photonic chip,” per the company, that can steer, track, and correct beams of light used to transmit data through the air without the use of cables. Oh, and this chip is about the size of a fingernail, compared to earlier generations that measured in about as big as a traffic light.

According to Google, the way Taara works isn’t entirely dissimilar from how fiber optic cables work. Traditional fiber uses light to carry data, too—it just does so through cables that cost a whole lot to bury underground, especially at a scale to support a massive network. Taara forgoes the physical wires and instead transmits data directly through an invisible beam of light. The company claims the technology is capable of transferring data at speeds as high as 20 Gbps. At the moment, it can send that data over distances as much as 12 miles.

Of course, Google isn’t the first to work with light to deliver data. The concept of “Li-Fi” has been around for over a decade and has started to gain traction in recent years, including IEEE officially recognizing the technology in 2023 and establishing standards for it. Starlink famously uses lasers to deliver data from its low-orbit satellites that communicate with base stations on the ground.

But Taara is not beaming data down from space, but rather across the earth. As long as the project’s light bridges can see each other (and the company has been working on mitigating line-of-sight disruptors like birds, rain, and fog), they can stay connected and transmit data. In an interview with Wired, project lead Mahesh Krishnaswamy offered some lofty promises—and a direct shot at some competition. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost,” he told the publication—though Wired noted that claim seems to be about Taara’s future potential and not something that it can actually achieve at scale right now.

Taara is more than just theoretical, though—it’s in use and commercially operational in 12 countries, per Wired. It was also deployed at Coachella to supplement phone networks. And, according to some experts, the light-based technology might be essential to future iterations of the internet, as radio frequency bands are running out of available bandwidth. So, let there be light.