With Project Taara, Google wants India's most remote regions to get multi-gigabit Internet

Google has a lot of nifty side projects that seek to render the site available to all. Loon is one case, whereas before being discontinued, the company's drive to introduce high-speed Internet to Indian railway stations made some good progress. Today, to bring the internet to certain underserved regions in India, the search giant wants to use light beams. And Google is currently teaming up with a couple of local telcos to make it possible.

In a project called Project Taara, Alphabet's X Lab has devised a way to transmit internet signals through wireless optical communications links, or light beams, to put it more simply. 

For a number of years, this technology has been tested on pilot projects in parts of Africa and India and Google has made substantial progress in sub-Saharan Africa by collaborating with regional operators to cover more areas.

Google is looking to do something similar in India as well, according to a report in ET, as well.

Google is reportedly looking to join hands with Airtel and Jio after an extended test run in Andhra Pradesh to deploy the same technology in remote areas of the country. However as the experiments are in their very early stages, it is not official that Google will necessarily go ahead with these plans. Even, even though they go ahead, we should not expect mass deployments across the country any time soon.

This technology is suitable for irregular terrains where laying fiber cables can be a problem, Google has said. Google can send links to a linked tower up to 20 km away with data rates that go as high as 20 Gbps with light beams, instead of cables.

Google uses this optical connection to transmit data using light signals under the same basis as the normal fiber optic cable, but it ports it into a wireless form.

Google recently spent a significant chunk of its $10 billion Reliance Jio fund dedicated to India to boost its presence in the Android budget market. For now, to know more about Project Taara, we need to wait for official confirmation from Google.