The year was 2013, and around 2.7 billion people had access to the internet. That was just 39% of the global population at the time.

That means that billions of people never got to witness Microsoft’s disastrous unveiling of its Xbox One that May. Or all the memes from Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show. They should count their lucky stars for having missed the Fox-inspired viral sensation (?) from Ylvis.

But in an effort to bring that connectivity to people with far more important needs than internet memes was Mahesh Krishnaswamy and the wider team behind Project Loon. The idea, a simple one but altogether radical: a system of balloons, interconnected to form a kind of stratospheric mesh network capable of bringing connectivity to those unconnected.

But the reality for Loon was far more grounded. The sheer costs associated with creating an aerial wireless network comprised of high-altitude balloons meant it found itself on the cutting room floor of Alphabet's X lab moonshot program alongside the likes of Google Glass and Foghorn, which tried to turn seawater into carbon-neutral fuel.

But there’s method in the madness, and the saying rang true for Loon. Because out of the ashes rose Taara, with Krishnaswamy and company taking the optics that interconnected those balloons, allowing them to communicate from one to another, and instead bringing them back down to Earth.

What followed was free-space optics deployed in more than 20 countries, with the likes of Airtel, T-Mobile, and SoftBank using them to boost connectivity between terminals at speeds of up to 20 Gb/s.

But before diving into how a technology that connected stratospheric balloons could break bottlenecks for carriers and beyond, let’s first answer the question:

What are free space optics?

Free space optics – the technology behind Taara – is essentially the idea of using light to communicate from one point to another.

Instead of sending gigabits of data across vast distances via fiber, which requires infrastructure to be put in place between two points, or radio-frequency (RF) wireless solutions, which require a license to use, these light-based optics transmit through the free space – or more simply, open air. This means there’s no need for spending on buildout, no impact from interference, and no end to the amount of data you could potentially transmit with big enough transceivers.

But it didn’t take the apparent $100 million per year it took to spend on Loon to come up with the idea of free space optics, with the concept a lot more familiar to some.

“The oldest form of it is a lighthouse, where they would signal to the ships and they can communicate using light at a very, very low bit rate,” Krishnaswamy explained. “But nonetheless, they were communicating with light back then. What we have done effectively is use [a] similar kind of idea, but at a much, much more higher frequency. We're talking 193 terahertz, so you can get gigabits and gigabits of data.”

Taara’s take on free space optics is more akin to a digital camera affixed with a laser pointer: The pointer modulates the light and sends data converted to a laser beam, and sends it over the air to be received at the camera, which then demodulates that data and outputs it as information.

"Both the terminals on either side of the link are effectively symmetrical, so both sides have a laser pointer and a digital camera,” Krishnaswamy explained. “So when one laser pointer transmits, the digital camera on the other side receives it, and then it needs to transmit, it can send the light using the laser pointer, and this digital camera receives it so effectively, you can now achieve 20 Gb/s in both directions as a result.”

Real-world applications & carrier relevance

Now that you have an expert understanding of free space optics, it’s easy to see why the technology is highly relevant for carriers and why some of the biggest names have already made use of it. The technology directly attacks constraints like backhaul capacity, fiber reach, spectrum limits, and, most of all, deployment costs and time, without forcing a rip-and-replace of what is already installed.

That last point, though, is particularly apt when Taara debuted a Pro version of its Lightbridge offering, with the company claiming its enhanced beaming solution could “instantly upgrade” existing infrastructure over the air, reportedly offering 99.999% carrier-grade reliability.

A bold claim, but one the CEO doubled down on in conversation with SDxCentral.

“If you have an operator or a telco and you have an existing radio connection, it could be a microwave, it could be a millimeter wave (mmWave), but more importantly, some kind of a radio solution that is providing 4G backhaul to your cell towers, as we go toward 5G, you’re going to need more data," Krishnaswamy said. “You could fiberize the tower, but it's very difficult to get fiber to the tower in every single case. We’re saying leave your equipment as it stands, add our Lightbridge Pro product, which has a built-in failover mechanism to switch down to a microwave. So if you have a microwave that is a gigabit-per-second, you add the Taara Lightbridge Pro into your network and instantly go to 20 Gb/s.”

The proof is in the pudding, at least in the sense of bringing this out of the moonshot labs and into live networks, ultimately going far beyond its original brief.

“We originally thought about using this to bridge connectivity to the unconnected, from tier‑two cities to tier‑three or rural areas where fiber is hard to reach,” Krishnaswamy said. “But that same problem exists even in urban areas, even in developed markets. Most towers don’t have enough capacity. RF spectrum is scarce, interference‑prone, and capacity‑limited.”

That has led to some unexpected use cases, like fiber redundancy where aerial fiber is cut‑prone, crossing difficult terrain like rivers and railways, and using Lightbridge as a rapid‑deployment backhaul for major events and emergencies.

“We did actually backhaul Coachella in 2023. And the Albuquerque Balloon Festival where there were almost a million people there. And then we recently did the U.S. Open last year at Flushing Meadows, New York," Krishnaswamy said. "We’ve also been helping out with disaster recovery, after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the volcanic eruptions in Tonga. Every time there's, unfortunately, a natural disaster, the first thing that goes out is communications, and they call us.”

But beyond bringing connectivity to those who need it – be they people left without power or clean water, or just influencers documenting their festival experiences – Taara’s lasting mark on the telecom space is all about shaking up the norm, which in a market as fickle as telecom is a rare thing to achieve.

None more so than in the tower space, where the traditional model of big steel and even bigger amortization faces continual efforts for reinvention, to varying degrees of success. But the push to 5G and beyond means cell radii shrink, and site counts subsequently explode, but regulators, landlords, city planners, and the tower companies themselves are in no rush to sign up for more towers.

Krishnaswamy argued that Taara’s Lightbridge and its subsequent successors effectively decouple capacity growth from tower growth, allowing carriers to treat rooftops, building façades, monopoles, and street furniture as first‑class backhaul sites.

“You need a very lightweight infrastructure that can be put on rooftops, on sides of buildings without creating all of that RF spectrum interference,” Krishnaswamy said. With non‑penetrating mounts and hitless failover to existing microwaves, Taara bets that operators can stand up “virtual towers” with fiber‑class backhaul in a matter of hours rather than months.

For an industry that often prides itself on incrementalism and standards‑driven caution, Taara is altogether something a little bit rarer, where a fundamentally different physical layer that doesn’t ask carriers to throw away what they already have. But whether it ends up a specialist tool for hard‑to‑reach links or a mainstream alternative to fiber will depend on how aggressively carriers embrace it.

And at the very least, Krishnaswamy and team show through Taara that there is still plenty of room in the telecom space to rethink not just the software running on the network, but the beams of light carrying it.

This article first appeared in the SDxCentral Telecom Supplement.

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