In an earlier period of its history, Google became famous for pursuing a range of long-shot projects, such as space elevators, as well as kites that doubled as wind turbines. Among the most whimsical was Loon, a plan to use high-flying balloons to beam superfast internet to areas that couldn’t be served by more traditional means. The company shut down the project last year, and it’s uncertain whether anyone will ever build a significant balloon-based wireless network. But some of the key technology behind Loon is reemerging in what could end up being the fastest long-distance wireless communications system yet created.
Earlier this year, a group of Google R&D veterans founded Aalyria Technologies, a startup meant to breathe new life into their innovations. One part of Aalyria centers on taking software used by the Loon group and turning it into a cloud-based system for managing complex networks that connect things like satellites, planes and boats with high-speed internet. Another part of the startup has repurposed a second set of former Google wares to create a line of laser-based wireless networking equipment.
At its office-cum-laboratory in Livermore, Calif., where sculptures of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads dot the walls, Aalyria has its two sets of engineers working on what it believes will be the basis of the networks of the future. Companies such as SpaceX and Amazon.com Inc. are in the process of putting up tens of thousands of satellites to beam down the internet from space to reach planes, cars, boats and drones. Meanwhile, businesses and billions of consumers in remote locations lack high-speed internet and are unlikely to be reached by fiber-optic cable-based systems anytime soon.
Aalyria aims to become the main platform directing the high-speed connections at the right places. “The heart of the company is to interconnect everything that exists today with everything that exists tomorrow,” said Chris Taylor, Aalyria’s chief executive officer.
The company has its work cut out for it to meet Taylor’s rather grandiose ambitions. Google, after all, only made this technology available because it didn’t see a clear enough path to commercializing the products. Now Aalyria seeks to merge two disparate projects into a cohesive whole.The 26-person company has found some believers in Google, which exchanged rights to its technology for an equity stake. J2 Ventures, and several individual investors have also backed Aalyria with an undisclosed amount of money.
The Aalyria software system was known as “Minkowski” inside Google and was used to connect the Loon balloons and other aerospace assets. The wireless networking technology was called Project Sonora and has never before been disclosed to the public.
Aalyria has renamed the wireless technology Tightbeam. In networking lingo, it’s a free-space optical communication system, meaning Aalyria uses lasers to transmit data wirelessly via light through things like the atmosphere and space rather than send information through fiber-optic cables in the ground. Researchers and companies have chased this type of technology for years, often with underwhelming results. Heat, rain, clouds, and fog are just some of the factors that tend to disrupt the laser signals to the point that they become unusable.
A number of the engineers behind Tightbeam, however, have been working on these disruption issues for almost 20 years—first at government-backed labs and then at Google—and are now claiming major breakthroughs in overcoming them. Through a set of novel hardware and algorithms, the Tightbeam technology analyzes the effects that, say, rain is having on a signal and then tries to reverse them and smooth out the signal. Aalyria says it can send data at speeds up to 1.6 terabits per second over hundreds of miles, which would be about 1,000 times faster than similar technology currently in use.
Aalyria demonstrated its technology by sending a signal from the rooftop of its headquarters to a mountaintop 20 miles away and back. In another test, it sent a signal from the ground to a volleyball-size receiver on an airplane flying about 100 miles away. “We can deliver 1 gigabit per second to every seat on a plane,” Taylor said. (This would be hundreds of times faster than current inflight internet systems.)
The Minkowski software has been renamed Spacetime. It was used inside Google to spread a high-speed connection from the ground across dozens of high-altitude balloons. The software system had to monitor and, crucially, predict the future position of the balloons to keep the connections strong between all of them as their distances and heights changed. Aalyria looks to use this same software to manage connections across tens of thousands of moving objects, be they satellites, airplanes, boats or vehicles.
The key technology behind Spacetime is algorithms that predict, for example, when a plane is about to lose its connection with a given satellite or ground station and then direct a new signal toward the plane without missing a beat. The startup has run tests doing this type of work across dozens of satellites, planes and ground stations, swapping signals as needed.
The combination of Tightbeam and Spacetime is somewhat odd, as though Aalyria came up with a vision of the future based on what was available at a Google garage sale. Taylor, however, believes that satellite operators, airlines, telecommunications companies and others will buy the Spacetime software, which is available now, in a bid to create more sophisticated high-speed internet networks. Then these same companies may choose to use Tightbeam to supercharge their networks when Aalyria’s wireless hardware systems go on sale next year.
Aalyria already has a contract to demonstrate its technology for the U.S. military. “I have worked with a lot of technology companies that can kind of replicate what Aalyria is doing in a very narrow geographic area,” said Robert Work, the former U.S. deputy secretary of defense who’s advising the startup. “But Aalyria is the only one I have seen that goes across the entire globe.”
But while the Spacetime technology was well-tested inside Google, the Tightbeam technology hasn’t been proven in the real world and will face much scrutiny, as laser-based wireless systems have often failed to live up to their billing in the past. “I would be broadly skeptical when someone is saying they have solved fundamental physics issues,” said Nathan Kundtz, a physicist and expert in wireless communications. “This is an area that is littered with the bodies of dead companies.”