A Google spin-off has successfully beamed a 100Gbps internet connection across 40 miles by harnessing optical lasers.
The milestone comes from Aalyria, a startup born from Alphabet’s Loon internet balloon project, which shut down in 2021. Founded a year later, Aalyria has been developing a laser system called Tightbeam, which can deliver high-speed internet connections from the air.
On Wednesday, the startup announced it had used Tightbeam in two tests. One of them has sustained a 100Gbps internet connection “for many hours in a day” over a 65-kilometer area via Tightbeam systems stationed on two mountaintops in Northern California, despite atmospheric conditions, says Aalyria CEO Chris Taylor.
(Credit: Aalyria)
“This 65km ground-ground optical link has been operational for several weeks and continues to operate today,” he told PCMag in an email. “Our system is engineered for resilience in dynamic environments—changing turbulence, visibility conditions, wind, etc. Even when there are transient environmental changes, our adaptive optics and tracking algorithms minimize any impact to the end user.”
The second test took Tightbeam out to sea (virtually). Using a ship simulator at the Naval Research Laboratory in Chesapeake, Virginia, Aalyria replicated “real-world conditions at sea, where two gimbals must lock onto each other through unpredictable motion caused by moving water.” (The lab awarded Aalyria a $7 million contract in 2023 to develop Tightbeam for the Navy.)
A video clip of the test shows the laser equipment rotating on an axis, like it’s on a moving ship. Tightbeam sustained “similar speeds for many hours of testing, under a variety of sea state profiles,” Taylor says. “Although there were a few short disruptions during the most stressful motion profiles, reacquisition happened within seconds and throughput was sustained for much of our testing.”
(Credit: Aalyria)
Aalyria aims to deliver Tightbeam technology for land, sea, air, and even satellite communications. SpaceX’s Starlink is also using lasers to beam 100Gbps connections per link. But for now, it’s confined to satellite-to-satellite communication rather than Earth-to-space.
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Aalyria is emphasizing that its lasers can be used on the ground, despite changing atmospheric conditions, which can disrupt the beams. “Our current design targets are up to 75km for ground-to-ground and up to 150km for ground-to-air,” Taylor says. “While our recent focus has been on terrestrial and maritime applications, we’re increasingly engaged in applying our atmospheric laser communications expertise to space-relevant scenarios.”
Aalyria may sound similar to another Alphabet company, Taara, which is also using technology from Loon. In March, Taara spun off from Alphabet, becoming its own company with the goal of selling its “Lightbridge” technology to internet service providers.
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Both companies want to deliver high-speed broadband to places traditional fiber can’t easily reach, such as remote islands and mountainous regions. However, Aalyria’s CEO says his own company is focused on delivering higher-capacity, long-range internet through lasers. In contrast, Taara’s “Lightbridge” system has a range of up to 20 kilometers while delivering speeds up to 20Gbps.
“You cannot bring broadband to every user in a community without high-capacity long-range optical links that supply it, such as tech that Aalyria offers, just like you cannot achieve that objective without lower-capacity, more affordable links to distribute data all across that community, such as with Taara’s product,” Taylor says.
There’s no word on how much Aalyria’s system costs or when it’ll be commercially deployed. But Taylor tells PCMag: “Aalyria’s laser communication terminals have many of the same challenges that most —maybe all— laser communication systems have. However, through our design process, we believe that we have mitigated many of those challenges.”
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About Michael Kan
Senior Reporter
I’ve been working as a journalist for over 15 years—I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017.
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