Spearheading the effort are Google and Facebook. Google, which is deploying helium balloons in the stratosphere to provide Internet connectivity in remote areas as part of Project Loon, wants to use radio or laser to enable its balloons to transfer data in areas that are far from ground relay stations. Facebook wants to launch drones that use laser beams for high-speed Internet connectivity in remote regions. The idea is that the drone closest to urban areas would use laser to connect to the Internet and then pass along the connection to drones flying over rural area. āBoth Google and Facebook think that if they can these aircraft in the stratosphere, roughly 20 kilometers above the Earth, they could kind of function like aerial cell towers and spread the connections more easily and without having to figure out the power and the cabling and everything on the ground,ā said Tom Simonite ā the San Francisco Bureau Chief of the MIT Tech Review..
A visitor takes pictures with her mobile phone in front of laser beams and a projected image of the Arc de Triomphe, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China
Facebook, in particular, is very interested in using laser to transfer data. āThey claim to have set a new record and made the fastest laser data transfer ever,ā said Simonite. āAnd I just think it shows that they are taking it seriously and are trying to push the technology forward.ā Other companies are coupling laser technology with radio redundancy to deliver uninterrupted Internet connectivity in inclement weather. In that kind of situation, Simonite said both laser and radio connections run in parallel, so that the laser can pick up any slack in case of radio interference. āTheyāre extremely fast,ā he said, ābut if anything gets in the path of the beam, the signal is blocked.ā If the laser cannot travel in a straight line, the radio side would cover the deficit. āSo itās like a redundancy thing so that they always have a connection thatās live,ā he said. But the need to use both radio and laser simultaneously can be limiting, said Simonite. He said ālasers can be used to fuller potentialā with project like the ones Google and Facebook are undertaking.
Lasers can emit light that can be modulated at very high speeds and can carry more than a petabit of data per second. A petabit is 1,000 terabits. A terabit equals a mind-boggling one trillion bits. The average U.S. Internet connection speed topped 11.7 megabits per second in the last quarter of this year, according to Akamaiās State of the Internet Report. Globally, Internet speeds vary, depending on equipment and region. Used in communications, they typically operate at 850 and 1550 nanometer wavelengths or colors of light, which are invisible to the human eye. The technology is promising for developing countries and in parts of the world where laying cables is difficult, where cables are easily damaged, or in rural areas where labor and materials tend to be expensive. Simonite said governments and cellular carriers now want to push their coverage into new, unsaturated regions. āAnd it looks like this technology could help maybe with that in places where the regular way of connecting up cell towers with cables and so on doesnāt really work so well,ā added Simonite.
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