X, Google’s sister company, has abandoned its plan to link the Internet with lasers and balloons. Instead, it has just announced a new project, still with lasers, to connect isolated places at high speed through optical links to the ground.
Alphabet, the parent company of, had the ambition to connect the remote places of the world by making stratospheric. It was the Loon project, carried out by its secret laboratory called simply X. The firm ended the project in January 2021 because of the costs.
However, X did not give up on the idea of using the . The idea is to connect digitally isolated communities by accepting a compromise on signal reliability. By placing the optical transmitters on the ground, the connection could be compromised by the , and in particular the , or the local, for example when go ahead.and launched the
A 20 Gbps connection with 99% stability
The firm carried out its tests between Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, and Kinshasa, the capital of the. The two towns are separated by only 4.8 kilometers, but the fiber must cross over 400 kilometers to bypass the Congo River. The team managed to transmit 700 terabytes of data in 20 days, with a connection available at 99.9%. The difficulty lies in aiming at the target, which measures only five centimeters, with the laser and without encountering any obstacle.
Thewill depend on local conditions, but X hopes to obtain availability of at least 99% and a up to 20 Gbps over links up to 20 kilometers in many places around the world. By accepting imperfect stability, many communities could be connected to the Internet at high speed without having to install hundreds of kilometers of cables at an often prohibitive cost.