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Lasers could take broadband where fiber optics can’t
Virginia-based Attochron plans to use lasers to solve the “last mile” problem, which leaves people and businesses without a fast internet connection.
This critical infrastructure, ranging from a few hundred feet to a few miles, can often be too expensive or difficult to build, because of challenges with the terrain or because it would serve too few users — issues that are a bigger problem in rural and remote areas. However, Google’s parent company Alphabet says it has already deployed hundreds of laser-based terrestrial broadband links through a project called Taara, which focuses on end users in rural areas in a dozen countries including India, Kenya and Fiji. James Osborn, a professor in the Department of Physics at Durham University, in the UK, who’s also not involved with Attochron, says the company’s technology seems sound on paper, although technical challenges remain due to the fact that the laser pulses it uses are very fast – a million times shorter than a nanosecond.
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