Google has always been a technology byword, the source of things like Kubernetes. One of its ideas, a project called “Loon” was supposed to provide Internet services through a network of balloons, a notion that sure sounds outlandish and didn’t get far. Now, some of the Loon concepts are reappearing in a Google spinout, Aalyria. The details on the new company, and on the technology, are a bit sparse at this point, but there’s enough to ask some intriguing questions, and maybe even provide some speculative answers.
First, let’s say that Loon was more sensible than it might sound. Google proposed to establish a mesh network of balloon-based cells that would be steered into position by changing elevation to capture winds that would take each balloon where it needed to go. Once there, each balloon would have a ground link and a link to other balloons, creating that mesh network I mentioned. The mesh would be the cell network, requiring no towers and having better coverage than a terrestrial tower would have. Google did a lot of work on all of the pieces of this system, and filed a number of patents.
Aalyria dispenses with balloons, but builds on two specific pieces of the stuff developed for the original project—the laser free-space optical links and the software that organizes the mesh. To quote the website, “Aalyria brings together two technologies originally developed at Alphabet as part of its wireless connectivity efforts: atmospheric laser communications technology and a software platform for orchestrating networks across land, sea, air, space and beyond.”
The software piece of this is called “Spacetime”, and it’s (apparently) based on the mesh software that was done for Loon. It provides for antenna link scheduling, traffic routing, and spectrum management for the system, including (potentially) “ground stations, aircraft, satellites, ships, and urban meshes.” The goal of this orchestration is (apparently) the creation of a connectivity mesh that (potentially) envelops all current network technology and creates multiple pathways to a given user. All significant network transport options would be covered and incorporated into the Aalyria mesh; “designed for interoperability with legacy, hybrid space, 5G NTN and FutureG network architectures.”
The laser piece is called “Tightbeam”, and it supplements the current transmission options to create connectivity where there’s no existing infrastructure. “Tightbeam radically improves satellite communications, Wi-Fi on planes and ships, and cellular connectivity everywhere.” To me, this means that Tightbeam would be available for use on/with planes and ships as well as in ground stations designed to connect with those endpoints, and also available as a backhaul technology for traditional cell sites and as a trunk connection in existing networks.
Tightbeam is highly secure, and that’s likely a part of the reason why Aalyria announced it had a contract with the Defense Innovation Unit, to support its Hybrid Space Architecture (HSA) initiative. The military value of this program is obvious; low-latency battlefield networks for warfighter support. Obviously, the same sort of technology could be used to create low-latency commercial network services. While free-space laser technology was ruled out in Loon because of cloud interference, Tightbeam is said to be usable in most or nearly all terrestrial weather conditions.
Tightbeam can track a moving aircraft and uplink to a satellite at rates of up to 1.6 Tbps, far higher capacity than current microwave channels and more difficult to interfere with. The technology has been tested out to over a hundred miles in the atmosphere, and in space it would obviously have far greater range. It’s also fairly portable; you can move a Tightbeam station around, even put it on a truck, I’m told. A combination of a ground-level Tightbeam station, a 5G mobile cell, and a satellite or aircraft that could offer a Tightbeam relay could deliver super-broadband ad hoc pretty much anywhere.
This admittedly meager description is about all we can get officially from Aalyria at this point, but there are some things we can, I think, safely infer from the stuff they provide.
First and foremost, I think we can assume that Aalyria is creating a multi-transport virtual network. I think that it builds a secure IP network over all the broadband options (including Tightbeam) using a virtual-network approach that isolates its traffic from baseline broadband services of each transport option. This new Aalyria network is responsible for picking the connectivity options that, when strung out into a connection, deliver the best performance and latency to the communicating parties. I think that HSA is an example of a virtual network overlay, in fact.
Second, Aalyria’s technology is the most powerful when it includes a Tightbeam-equipped satellite network, because this configuration could be made to deliver broadband to anything on or around the earth. Absent the satellite link, fully realizing the technology would depend on a terrestrial Tightbeam mesh or aircraft, which quickly gets you into the Loon-balloon model that apparently didn’t work. But it could, perhaps, with Tightbeam. You could also potentially see commercial aircraft with multiple Tightbeam stations, linking to the ground and to other aircraft in a floating/flying/swirling mesh.
It’s likely that the early applications of Aalyria’s technology in the commercial space would involve fixed terrestrial locations, such as mountaintops, as repeater points. That would mean that the beam path would be close to the ground for at least part of its travel. Beam power isn’t given, so we can’t know whether the beam could present a risk to a person. I would assume that any Tightbeam unit would have to be high enough to eliminate the risk of having someone or something wander into the beam, though it’s also possible the unit would recognize a loss of path and shut down before damage could occur. I also assume that there would be an aiming/targeting procedure that would get things closely aligned before any higher power was used.
One terrestrial/commercial application for Tightbeam would be the creation of low-latency paths to tie metaverse elements together. If we assume that the range in the atmosphere is a maximum of 100 miles, we could hop across the entire US in roughly 25 links if we could get enough altitude in flatter places like the midwest. We could mesh population centers along the east and west coasts with a dozen or so on each coast, too. This level of commitment wouldn’t be beyond Google itself, nor beyond other cloud giants.
I’ve talked a lot about Tightbeam and not much about Spacetime, but if we assume I’m correct that the Aalyria system creates a virtual overlay across all the transport/transmission options and optimizes it dynamically, then the same model could be applied in theory to manage service overlays on current network infrastructure. Would it be possible to actually do routing of traffic this way, too? I think that it’s unlikely that the underlying IP network community we call “the Internet” would change over, but new services and the cloud? It could happen.
In short, this new spinout could prove to be a very interesting development for network technology. I’m going to watch it carefully, and I’m sure others will too.