Taara, a company specializing in free-space optical communication, just released the Beam — a shoebox-sized device that uses its proprietary Photonics Platform to deliver up to 25 Gbps of bidirectional throughput. More than that, the company says that it has a range of 10 kilometers and claims that it has ultra-low latency, making it ideal for AI applications.
This isn’t the first optical transceiver developed by the company, as it has been working on the technology since 2017 at Google’s X development lab. In fact, Taara says that its Lightbridge device has already been deployed in over 20 countries alongside carriers including T-Mobile, Vodafone, Airtel, and Digicel. While this offers a longer range of 20 km, it has a slightly lower 20 Gbps throughput and uses mechanical parts to keep the beam aligned.
On the other hand, Beam uses silicon photonics to deploy an optical phased array with more than a thousand miniature emitters to track, shape, and steer the beams without requiring any moving parts. The company promotes this as an alternative to expensive and time-consuming fiber deployments or the complicated spectrum licensing requirements of radio frequency communications. Its compact size and relatively low power consumption mean that it can easily be deployed in hours instead of weeks or months, and you can install it practically anywhere — from existing towers and cell sites to rooftops and mountain tops — as long as the two transceivers retain line of sight (LOS).
Aside from the compact size brought by silicon photonics, the company also says that using this technology would allow it to build more capable and more efficient generations of its optical communications transceivers in the future. This makes it similar to how semiconductors have evolved in the past, where Moore’s Law stated that transistors would have doubled in number on a particular chip every other year. While Taara did not give any details on how it expects to achieve this, other firms are working on this tech, with one startup even saying that it developed an optical transistor that’s 10,000 times smaller than existing tech and capable of handling 1,000 x 1,000 multiplication matrices.
The only drawback to this technology is that it’s affected by weather conditions, like fog and heavy rain, and other disruptions, such as smoke, that can reduce visibility or cut line of sight altogether. Nevertheless, the company advertises the Beam as a part of a light mesh network, allowing communication to continue through different nodes. Aside from that, it also introduced the Lightbridge Pro, which adds an automatic radio frequency or fiber backup to the original Lightbridge, ensuring seamless switching in case suboptimal atmospheric conditions interfere with its optical communication.
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