Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet system, may soon face competition from Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which is developing a laser internet system, Reuters reports.

The Alphabet company has already tested and abandoned the idea of ​​providing Internet to remote areas of the world with the help of balloons that rise into the Earth’s stratosphere.

But now the company is working on a system with the same lens, but with light rays. The project, known as ‘Taara’, is being developed at Google’s innovation lab ‘X’ and was launched in 2016 after the stratospheric balloon plan ran into problems due to high cost.

And this time things are going better, says Mahesh Krishnaswamy, Taara project manager.

Executives of Taara and Bharti Airtel, one of India’s largest telecommunications companies, told Reuters that the project is now moving towards full-scale development of the new technology in the Asian country.

Krishnaswamy says Taara has helped connect 13 countries to the internet so far, including Kenya, Fiji and Australia, and is targeting expansion in Africa and the Pacific Islands.

It also states that Taara’s strategy is to aim for the lowest cost in the market in terms of providing internet in isolated or poorly interconnected areas.

The device developed by the project is the size of a traffic light, has a built-in laser that transmits data through light, and works essentially like fiber-optic Internet, but without the cables.

Alphabet will test its laser internet system in India

Less well known to the general public, the “X” lab is a division of Google that works on projects that seem to straddle the line between reality and science fiction. His research led to self-driving car company Waymo, drone delivery service Wing and medical startup Verily Life Sciences.

Randeep Sekon, the Indian company’s chief technology officer who is working with X researchers on the Taara project, says it will also help bring faster internet services to cities in developing countries.

He argues that this will be possible because it is cheaper to laser data from one building to another than to bury cables under cities.

The technology will be implemented this summer in Ossur, a village in India located 3 hours south of the city of Chennai, India’s technology hub.

“There are hundreds of thousands of such villages in India. I can’t wait to see how this technology can be useful in connecting all these people online,” says Mahesh Krishnaswamy.

In 2020, Google announced that it would invest $10 billion in the digitization of India, with $700 million to buy a 1.28% stake in Bharti Airtel.

X and Google are subsidiaries of Alphabet, while Taara’s partnership with the Indian company is separate from Google’s investment in India.