Alphabet's Taara to Deploy Free Space Optics in Kenya

Alphabet’s Project Taara is now working with Econet and its subsidiaries, Liquid Telecom and Econet Group, to commercially deploy free space optics trunking systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. The initial use cases will involve signal trunking across rivers or transmission through any other areas where it would be expensive, difficult or dangerous to lay physical cables, or where microwave radio would be the logical alternative,

source: Alphabet 

Taara’s links will begin rolling out across Liquid Telecom’s networks in Kenya first.

A single Taara link can cover distances up to 20 km and can transmit bandwidth of up to 20 Gbps or more, Taara says. The technology is a point-to-point trunking approach originally investigated to support Alphabet’s Project Loon internet access system using balloons.

In that use case, the problem to be solved was creation ofdata links between balloons that were flying over 100 km apart.

But free space optics has been proposed as a point-to-point trunking solution for decades in niche applications such as sending video security camera signals from remote locations to monitoring stations. 

The deployments illustrate how some technologies take decades to reach even relatively limited commercial use in the connectivity business.