Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers

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304 pointstadeegan271 comments

I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.

Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.

Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...

But smoke/cloud kills them.

Not necessarily. Depends on the wavelength.

How is better communication scary for military? The weapons themselves are

Jam resistant comms are critical for drones, and other precision weapons and their infrastructure. Even if line of sight is interrupted modern drones can return to signal nowadays, relay information, and return to target with corrections. You may not need optical cable anymore

I expect drones will become fire-and-forget in two to three years. They won't be jammable because the pilot is in the drone.

Fire-and-forget drones already exist. They are called missiles.

Missiles generally go from point A and then blow up point b. Are there any missiles that leave base, fly around for a bit trying to identify targets, and if they can't identify any targets then return home?

I said that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the line between "drone" and "missile" seems to have gotten pretty blurry with the Ukraine war featuring FPV drones holding a hand grenade that are effectively a human-piloted missile.

Some modern missiles can fly around to identify targets, but they can't return home. They can blow up harmlessly if nothing is a target, though. They can also dodge and weave the way FPV pilots do.

Obviously, "drone" has a much more expansive mission profile than "missile."

Missle is a projectile, propelled by rocket motor. Drone is an aircraft vehicle, capable of transporting explosives or whatever. There is a fat line between drone and a missile, there are different in everything: control, speed, trajectory, weight, flying principles. I don't know how you can say they are even close. Just because both fly and do boom? Then you can say there is a thin line between cow launched from catapult and a missile.

Cruise missiles are missiles without rockets.

A cow launched from a catapult is indeed a missile, if we want to be pedantic.

The term you're looking for is loitering munitions. From Wikipedia: "Some loitering munitions may return and be recovered by the operator if they are unused in an attack and have enough fuel"

You are describing cruise missiles

Should the military not have internet? If laser based internet is better than satellite or microwave or wireless (I assume the military uses these three). Then isn't that good?

I think you're too late. Pretty sure the military has line-of-sight free-space-optics to satellites since at least the second Iraq war.

One can only wonder how small the "receivers" (routers, really) have gotten by now.

Cubesats carry laser comms if that's what you mean.

Those work in vacuum though so you need a bit less laser power. The atmosphere attenuates your signal if you’re doing ground to ground or ground to aircraft links so you probably need a bit more laser power. But I agree that that’s probably not the difficult thing about the whole system.

> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming

The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.

Damn guess we have to blow up the stars

…you know, for defense

Or create a lot of artificial ones to confuse the missile.

Swarms to block the cameras maybe?

At this point though, couldn’t you just blow up your own country and thus accelerate warming so much as to doom the rest of humanity in a dozen years? I might have read the wrong article on that though so don’t quote me.

Aperture Science would do it.

They still owe me some cake

I have terrible news regarding said cake.

Can you imagine if someone just turned off the sky?

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is based on this premise.

Singularity Sky

Nine Billion Names of God

Who are you? Cixin Liu?

The universe winks for thee.

This form of navigation is probably only accurate enough for nuclear weapons, you’re not going to get meter-Range CEPs with that. You probably have to select a city you want to hit.

While you probably can't target a cigarette butt on the street, you could definitely hit a building. Especially if the ICBM is paired with image recognition (which it has already for star nav) and/or backup positioning mechanisms like cell tower locations or well-known broadcasting tower locations (think television stations).

An ICBM is coming in at hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase, you’re not going to guide it anywhere using cell tower signals. The guidance is done much earlier.

And I would doubt image recognition for ground features would make it that accurate, too. Before reentry, you’re very high and fast and reentry isn’t that predictable to get you accurate enough to hit a house. And during reentry, you’re not going to see anything though plasma. And after reentry, you probably don’t have enough time and control authority to still guide into a specific house.

ICBM guidance is very different from cruise missiles.

Yeah that would work for drones and slow cruise missiles but not ICBMs.

> An ICBM is coming in at hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase, you’re not going to guide it anywhere using cell tower signals.

Hypersonic glide ICBMs have been successfully tested by China, and are under development in the US, so it's entirely possible to maneuver, and optionally guide them in the terminal, though perhaps not advisable on a jammable channel, except perhaps as an anti-radiation weapon.

This is a very good read on the state of the art when it comes to submarine-launched missile accuracy, which are presently inertially guided with a stellar update during flight.

https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

Thanks for the link, very interesting. So CEP is estimated to be around 100m. Better than I thought but I wouldn’t call it hitting a specific house yet.

What do you consider the primary benefit of pinpointing a particular house in nuclear war?

I don’t know if it matters now but at some point certain targets were hardened to near misses of certain sizes but not direct strikes. So the better your accuracy the smaller the weapon (or fewer) you can use to take out those targets.

So you could say the use would be increased certainty your enemies command and control and other bunkers would be destroyed increasing the odds of “winning” whatever happens afterwards.

There is no "winning" in global thermonuclear war... :/

That’s why I said the guidance is only really usable for nuclear weapons. I wasn’t saying the guidance is bad, I was saying it’s not accurate to a few meters.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43393504

Oh you're right, my bad. I got lost in the conversation and looking into the types of guidance systems and I forgot that was your original point.

Quantum navigation is likely to be more precise.

Down to the Planck scale?

well there is this now as well - you don’t need to use the stars when you already have detailed aerial images of the earth - https://www.spectacularai.com/gps-free

To risk being pedantic, US SLBMs (Tridents) indeed use stellar updates for their inertial guidance system.

Our ICBMs have no update mechanism at all. Once they're out of the silo, they're completely on their own.

ICBMs would be more confident in their starting position and orientation. SLBMs would necessarily have more uncertainty in the initial conditions.

You can create nuclear load so powerful it won't matter where it hits.

Teller, is that you ?

"close only matters in horseshoes and nuclear strikes"

The BM part means "Ballistic Missile", which sounds like they're basically "thrown" into a parabolic path towards their target, like a falling rock.

Or am I over-interpreting the name?

Have a read of how MERV part of some ICBMs works. Lots going on as far as targeting goes. Also take a look at Trident 2 which can use GPS for course correction but isn’t reliant on it.

That's exactly the right interpretation. You chuck them into space and after the rocket quits, Isaac Newton takes over.

Contrast hypervelocity weapons, which -- contrary to the name -- don't really go faster but they can maneuver in the atmosphere at that speed.

The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.

In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.

The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.

Why is this meme always pasted in to threads about missile guidance?

Because it’s a classic gag, even if it’s out of place on HN

https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ?feature=shared

Not just an online gag, that's related to an excerpt of an alleged December 1997 issue of "Association of Air Force Missileers" on the GLCM Guidance System. Likely submitted in jest.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050514035446/http://www.afmiss...

that is so romantic. Rockets looking at the stars one last time before obliterating $cityname

Observing distant nuclear fusion, before unleashing it locally.

fission != fusion, but yeah

I’ve got some bad news for you about modern nuclear weapons.

h-bombs do both

fission + fusion

The fission primary is used to trigger a secondary fusion reaction in modern weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

All fusion weapons are fission weapons first (like a few nanoseconds first).

All fission weapons are not necessarily also fusion weapons. But probably most are nowadays.

Every nuclear weapon in the active US stockpile has a secondary fusion stage, the last pure fission weapons were removed from service and dismantled in 1992.

Most of the cost in a nuclear weapon is in the primary. It only makes sense to build pure fission weapons when you want very low-powered nukes for close range tactical use; the DoD has determined that don't see enough use for them to justify the upkeep of specific weapons.

i've been to $cityname many times. there are lot of available single women there near me in $cityname

This makes me wonder how many fake stars an adversary would have to put up (and for how long?) in order to confuse a celestial navigation system.

Something similar was available since the previous century for ship to ship communications where there is a line of sight.

Such communications can't be intercepted or triangulated.

Free space optics were attempted extensively in the ISP space 15, 20 years ago for FDD 1 Gbps links at short distances roof to roof in major metro areas, they're EXTREMELY vulnerable to falling over in rain/snow conditions, and path length limitations, compared to 71 to 86 GHz millimeter wave (using a 2000 MHz wide FDD channel going each way in a high/low split). I'm very skeptical.

I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.

They've probably had it for decades. Laser communication was being used by commercial TV stations in the U.S. in the 1990's. WNBC-TV in New York used a laser to transmit video from its Manhattan skyline camera in New Jersey back to 30 Rock.

I have a vague notion that it didn't work great in all weather conditions, but it was a long time ago.

LOS communications has been around for a long time now in the form of microwave towers. [1]

But further, jamming is still doable, just not with a portable electronic device. Stir up some dust and all the sudden coms are down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_transmission

I was doing communications in military. For temporary networks, we used microwave links and they requires line of sight. The reason to use direct link is that missiles can be easily targeted to any radio source you can hear and take down the network.

Yeah, I was aware of this because of work with telecommunications in rural locations. Nobody is burying a cable over a mountain, that's too expensive and too much work. So instead, they'll setup microwave towers. Being on a mountain has the benefit that you are already in elevated locations that are easy to shoot a phone signal across the range.

It's worth noting that free space laser comms would also have this problem though: the atmosphere has dust, and any IR detector will see bloom and reflection of dust from a laser which will draw a straight line right back to the emitter.

Shoot a laser pointer at the receiver and there's a good chance you have jammed the thing.

how do you detect/find the receiver? thats seems to be a problem

I thought comms was two way.

so you have a laser and want to jam the comms channel. How do you find where the comms channel is, where is the receiver, where do you point your laser to jam enemy comms?

I agree it is not an easy task. But lasers can be detected with the right equipment (think the classic "laser through fog" but happening to plain air molecules), unit movements can be tracked and straight sight line is a significant logistical restriction.

But if they were only receiving. Well, that's going to be pretty hard to confirm and even if you "jam" it, then so what?

> But lasers can be detected with the right equipment (think the classic "laser through fog" but happening to plain air molecules)

You are assuming that the only source emitting at the specific wavelength is the laser you are targeting. This is not how it would work, the side using laser comms would also fly decoy drones that bathe the sky in the same wavelength as the comms channel.

This is also key part of how LPI radars on stealth aircraft work. Yes, in a spherical cow in vacuum environment you can in principle always trace a radar signal back to its source. But add a whole bunch MALDs radiating on the same band as the radars, and suddenly it becomes impossible to pinpoint the sources.

There's already military usage of similar devices. I wouldn't be surprised if Taara has a supplier that also supplies several militaries.

> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming.

I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.

But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a war if your drones/loitering munition are less effective than those of your enemies because your control signals are jammed you will give in and make your weapons find their target without that control signal. That leads to an arm race of ever more sophisticated autonomous weapons. That is scarry for many reasons, and probably a worse outcome for all of us.

On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic and ensurers that a human mind can remain in the loop. So… maybe being better at jamming resistant communication is actually better for humankind?

I got seriously terrified by reading a PKD SF story at 15 about the few surviving humans hiding from war drones still hunting people long after the war had ended.

Second Variety, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety I've commented this before but it is closer to Terminator than the Harlan Ellison story IMO.

Yeah, that was the one. Really burned itself into my mind.

The movie was OK, but you can only get shocked once.

Similar but reverse, I felt unfortunate to have read the novelette after watching Terminator because part way in the story I thought - this is almost all of the AI/self replicating autonomous robot points of the Terminator movie just without the time travel. The movie addition of time travel adds a bit of hope to an otherwise totally bleak story resolution.

Haven't read the book, but I did see "Screamers". Wikipedia says: "Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies, writes that the film is more faithful than most other adaptations".

I can't comment on whether that's true, but the movie still haunts me. Odd, since as Wikipedia says "it received a mixed critical reception and failed at the box office". There was nothing mixed about my reception of it.

It's pretty wild that PKD imagined AI controlled combat drones in 1953, and 70 years we'll soon have them.

I haven't read that one, but it reminds me of Black Mirror's "Metalhead", which absolutely terrified me.

The movie Screamers (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/) is based off it, decent sci-fi.

draws from the same well, intellectually. terrifying stuff, that BM episode is, too.

> On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic

I'm a bit more pessimistic than that. I think the driver for autonomy will be that the speed at which things happen on the battlefield. People being attacked with automated weapons might not be able to make response related decisions fast enough. The automation will be in place to enable a rapid response. It will become an arms race involving speed of attack and response. It will be the military equivalent of high-frequency trading, involving things like swarms and directed energy weapons.

The phrase you're looking for is OODA loop, popularized in the 80s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategi...

> Boyd’s Law of Iteration: speed of iteration beats quality of iteration [0]

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/

Also, Patton's classic 'a good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week'

I personally won't worry until microwave ovens are regulated. I'm still sore that I didn't publish a decade ago.

c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6XdcWToy2c

What?

Ukraine's drones are already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away.[0][1] They're also using drones that trail a fibre optic over several kilometres to avoid jamming.[2]

[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...

Dang what does a drone carriable several kilometer fiber spool look like?

Previous article has pictures

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41143322

The lower canister in the last of the three links, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...

Difficult to judge scale, maybe the size of a drinks can or food can? Fiber is pretty thin.

Half a can of soda. The main electronics controller visible in the photo is likely 20x20 or 30x30mm, the standard for FPV style drones.

I was pretty shocked to find out that wire-guided missiles were(/are?) a thing. This seems easier than that.

Pretty sure they were in the thousand feet range, not multiple kilometers…

(Welp… 3 km range… though to me wire that long seems like it’d be easier than optical cable back in the 70s)

Wire guided is still the primary means of guiding torpedos from submarines, because it gives you an unjammable, un-interceptible, consistent communication interface, and in torpedoes the wire spools out for tens of kilometers.

If you want something really cool, look up old fashioned TV guidance. We built weapons that guided based a TV signal, and edge detection in that signal. In 1958.

basically like a cheapo SACLOS missle, i.e. the TOW missile, which have been using that (fiber) approach for decades now.

> already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away

This capability is basically a reinvention of the walleye television bomb, which locked onto targets using edge detection on a signal from an internal television camera. 1960s technology.

> Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities

They are not obvious to me. Care to explain?

"People with blue and yellow patches are the enemy. I won't be able to communicate with you after you leave the forward base, but you need to navigate about 1 mile southwest then kill the people you find with a blue and yellow patch for as long as you can."

Then the quadcopter/Atlas/Spot/a Terminator/a tank driven by AI starts rolling across the landscape, while humans flagged as suspicious by Google because we lack sufficient tracking data in our browsers fill out reCaptcha images that say "Select all images that contain [soldiers] in this set."

Nearby, a scared local child distracts themselves from the distant horrors by drawing a picture of the sun in the sky with their crayons.

Some time later, the robot is able to transmit back a few bytes of telemetry to base, which publishes a press release that describes the number of enemies slain.

This is an example of the lack of connectivity, not the horror of too much.

Obligatory xkcd: click on all the photos that show places you would run for shelter during a robot uprising https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2228:_Machine_Lea...

> Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.

This sounds like you would also be in favor of backdoored encryption. I disagree. It's a tool / improvement like any other, how you use it makes it scary. BTW this is nothing new, it's just packaged nicely and (I assume) massively improved technology. DIY and open source solutions were possible in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA (static ones tho)

This is something the U.S. military has been working on for some time. I know of at least one project that's very advanced: https://www.ga-asi.com/multi-mission-payloads/lac12-pod

Laser light can be dispersed or bent by atmosphere and whatever is suspended in it, like smoke or drizzle. Also, it needs precise targeting.

I can assume that laser links work wonderfully in outer space.

On land or sea, I can imagine using tactical smoke generators to disrupt laser links and visual navigation, giving an advantage to to systems that use e.g. microwaves for "vision", and radio channels for communication.

Also, why are you afraid of this development?

Wait until military people put the receiver on their chest.

Then all the military dramas will flip from "sniper acquired target" to "communication with friendlies reestablished"

Sounds like a nice way to do IFF. Optical transponder. Only responds on a valid challenge received.

> Only responds on a valid challenge received.

Perhaps I misunderstand but that sounds like a scary failure mode.

traders have done this across cities for a long time

What specifically are you worried about? Better comms will always help people, be it to flourish more in peace or more efficiently killing one another. Most inventions in the 20th century either came from the military or ended up being used by the military.

At the same time, fibre-optic drones have being successfully fielded by Russia and now increasingly by Ukraine. Immune to jamming with a minimum range of 10km.

There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree.

https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/08/ukraine-fiber-optic-dr...

There is also some very recent advances to laser communication, which explains the increased interest: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01201-7

Line of sight is not immune to jamming, in fact it’s susceptible to more.

Physically.

Given any tech, assume the military already has it. In fact, assume any tech that is public is approved by military for public use.

Why afraid? It's obvious it'll be used, nothing to be afraid, more like expect it to. Mount a base station on an AWACS and you've got the whole theatre covered. Clouds are an issue, obviously.

The U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) has been deploying this tech - free space optics (FSO) - for about a decade.

https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=555...

Hasn't this been possible with microwaves for a long time? I remember site-to-site microwave Internet between tall buildings being used commercially in the 1990s

Militaries have been using point to point laser or microwave for things for decades. They've also used coiled fiber optics (and still do) for missles, etc.

It's really easy to blast an area with high power disruptive radiation (EFI, RFI, laser, etc.) to deny comms, though.

RONJA[0] with lasers? >smile<

Free space optics always seemed like a neat idea. For space-based communication, particularly if your "mission" involves as little stray emission as possible, I would think free space optics would be a win.

I would assume there's more error correction, but otherwise I wonder how dramatically this differs from modulating light on a fiber. It seems like a similar problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA

Exactly my first thought. Had this link in my bookmarks for an eternity. http://images.twibright.com/tns/1208.html

There have been some recent advances which greatly improved the optical bandwidth and make such projects much more feasible cost wise: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01201-7

Single digit amount of photons is needed per bit.

Intersting... my physics class in high school (late 80s) made an RF modulated laser transmission system for sending analog video between two buildings a few miles apart. It worked great. I didn't think it was that big of a deal at the time since we had already done microwave and other frequencies.

This section from the marketing blurb doesn't sound too promising:

When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime.

In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.

Optical fiber is absolutely the simplest and best option for almost any form of long distance connectivity. Maybe this technology will become cost/performance competitive in about 15 years after the HFT firms have invested billions trying to extract an extra cent out of our financial markets.

That's not the market they're going for though. They're more of a competitor to Starlink

There's also obvious applications to places where weather is more predictable. There's plenty of areas and small towns in the Great Basin region that have basically no internet. This would be a quick and easy way to set those places up with internet with more reliability than something like starlink

The problem with selling inferior technologies is that sooner or later people are going to stop using them (even in the Grad Basin region). Not exactly a recipe for success.

What are you labelling inferior here? Both Taara and Starlink?

Yes, both of those are inferior to wired infrastructure but they clearly have their usecases. If you were to start a mining project that lasts a few months or even a few years but is expected to eventually be finished and packed up, Taara seems like exactly what you need.

It can also outcompete Starlink because it won't require us to constantly replace decaying satellites. Also means less space debris pollution which is increasingly becoming a huge concern

But why would these not be places already served by terrestrial wireless internet service providers? It seems like it would be much easier and generally more attractive to serve locations like this using, for example, 5 GHz.

Normally, the lack of (near) line-of-sight is one of the biggest limiting to those sorts of deployments, but that would also have to be solved for any place being served with FSO.

a point to point terrestrial bridge large piece of equipment that costs $5,000+, needs a professional to install it, and works on either free space optics or V-band or E-band radio is not in any way a competitor to starlink. It's more a place to take a 1 to 10 Gbps ethernet connection as a link between two towers or roofs that can 'see' each other as an alternative to where laying fiber may be cost prohibitive or would take too long to build (or both).

Assuming this thing doesn't utterly fail in rain at a moderate distance, this would be something you use to feed a POP which then redistributes service to end users by some totally other technology (5/6 GHz band PTMP radio system, GPON, XGSPON, G.fast on copper, docsis3/docsis3.1, etc)

It's interesting at 36 to look back at what I think would disrupt connectivity a decade ago:

- Google Fiber (it wasn't possible to do it cheaper than incumbents, so it devolved to standard incumbent x why would 40% margin company invest billions to get Comcast's peak profit margin of ~15% profit)

- Starry Internet (too expensive to build out, I have it and it's good, but the company certainly didn't scale)

- 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)

It's hard for me to wrap my mind around why this would work at all, sounds like a more-susceptible-to-bad-conditions version of Starry.

I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.

From my perspective, Google Fiber 100% disrupted connectivity - it woke the incumbents up and made them offer competitive Fiber. In that sense, they succeeded! My last three connections from my last three ISPs have all been gigabit (one of which was Google Fiber, easily the best internet I've ever had). I think they're expanding again, too, though I wish they had stayed as aggressive with rollout as they started.

That's a really good point, back home, Verizon didn't bother with Fios investment until then.

Ironically, Google Fiber purchased a wireless provider - Webpass - back in 2016 which is deployed in parallel to their fiber offerings.

> 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)

I'm guessing this is a US thing? In Europe, 5G is definitely faster while latency is on par with 4G. YMMMV between EU countries though.

You're right, it's definitely better than 4G, my wording was unclear, more in the sense of "Would I make this my home ISP?" than "how did 5G go?" (I would have thought cell providers would have 20-30% of the market now, ah, the follys of youth...)

5G home internet is the preferred in Australia where fibre isn’t present.

Even at my house where I have FTTH, my mobile 5G connection is persistently faster and quicker, that is both bandwidth and latency are superior on my phone from my home location.

Of course, the pricing is structured so you’re better off paying for both, either fixed internet plus mobile phone plane, or fixed 5G and mobile phone plan, depending on what is available at any specific location, but typically not all three options.

Thank you centrally planned infrastructure.

TBH I think a lot of it is many people still don't understand the product or misunderstand their actual needs/usage. Plenty of "normie" households can easily meet all their needs with a decent 5G fixed wireless install. As we see more cord cutting we'll probably see continued growth in fixed wireless.

FWIW, most other ISP types are treading water in terms of overall subscribers while the only real growth overall in new subscribers is fixed wireless. Your gut probably wasn't wrong that fixed wireless will probably grab 20-30%+, but just timescale-wise off a bit.

https://www.opensignal.com/2024/06/06/5g-fixed-wireless-acce...

> I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.

That is not a correct understanding for how the Starlink network behaves today[0]. While I can't speak for using it outside of the U.S., I have not faced any interruptions outside of a few times during very severe weather.

[0] in the early days of the constellation, there were sub-second or a few second drops when there was no satellite overhead. But this dropped off very quickly once the constellation size increased.

I see, tyty (been wondering for quite some time)

The key breakthrough for 5G was allowing ~10x the number of devices to connect to a node compared to 4G. 5G is what allowed the toppling of data caps that was by far the #1 consumer complaint for years. 4G just couldn't handle heavy loads well, so data caps were needed to constrain demand.

Teleco's aren't going to say this out load, but it's the real reason why they were so celebratory about 5G, despite it coming off like just a renamed 4G to the average user.

Why would they not be loud about it? I think "We've built out 5G so we can get rid of your data caps!" is a message any telecom would want to broadcast out, unless I'm missing something

They don’t want to get rid of your data caps. They want to get rid of their data bandwidth limitations.

> 4G just couldn't handle heavy loads well, so data caps were needed to constrain demand.

In many parts of the world uncapped data has been the norm since around GPRS.

Could that be because they aren’t as densely populated by users so even if everyone with a phone has no data cap, they won’t overload the network? Which countries were that for example?

basically every european country? they've all had much larger datacaps than north america for years preceding 5g and most are quite densely inhabited.

I’m from Germany and I don’t know a single person with unlimited mobile data. That’s very rare here.

And yet probably everyone you know in EU has a cheaper Internet per GB that folks in the US. I have 2 SIM cards, one provider charges me $10/GB, while the other has a 2-GB packet for $6.

Both of those prices are considerably more expensive than what I pay for service in the US. Even the cheaper one is more than 2x more expensive than what I pay per gig, including unlimited calls and texts + roaming to a lot of North America.

Who's your provider if you don't mind me asking?

Mint. 15GB for $20/mo works out to $1.33/GB while your 2GB plan is $3/GB.

But there are other MVNOs out there like tello which also have a 2GB/$6 plan in the US, and other MVNOs which offer unlimited data for like $25-30/mo like visible and US Cellular.

Plenty of cheap MVNOs out there these days.

Tello is actually what I use for my secondary data, Fi is my main (mostly because I travel somewhat and the data costs the same in all the destinations I care about without having to juggle SIM cards).

I'm not a good case study because I rarely use more than 2gb in a month, so Mint would come closer to $10 a gig... :)

In Finland I pay 20€/mo for unlimited data (bandwidth capped at 200 Mbps). With some shopping around it can be cheaper/have more bandwidth. The pricing has been similar at least since 3g. And I recall having a similar deal in the UK five years ago.

There's also 28 GB EU roaming per month included, and 2.23€/GB after that.

£10/month pay as you go SIM for 30gb here in the UK and im sure there are better offers

As I deployed Starlink in an extremely obstructed spot last year for a few weeks, where multi-second dropouts were quite common... it impressed me JUST HOW MANY satellites they have up there, and just how usable my dish was despite only having ~60% of its field of view clear. It's switching satellites much more often than every five minutes.

The built-in obstruction mapping tool quickly demonstrated that though each satellite represents a tiny slice of sky... over the course of the day you're seeing a vast number of satellites at a high variety of spatial angles and orbits.

I wouldn't recommend that obstructed situation to anyone (and it's going in a much clearer location this coming summer) but the users I was supporting reported it a far far better solution than the 4G LTE they'd been depending on prior. Not a patch on fiber, but a great solution for an awkwardly remote property.

It's crazy that almost every house is able to be attached to a pipe carrying high pressure water that will flood if it is broken or attached wrong, thick wire carrying high current that will shock you, a pipe containing explosive gas, and a six inch cast iron pipe full of poop, but adding one more connection to a tiny thin strand of glass wrapped in plastic is too expensive.

A lot of the houses that don't currently have modern high speed internet access also don't have water pipes and sewer pipes. They have wells or water collection/delivery and septic tanks.

Electricity and twisted pair phone line is really all that's been pulled to their property.

For Starlink the User Terminal (antenna a.k.a. "Dishy") is a phased array. It tracks the satellite as it passes from west to east. Each satellite is in view for around 15 seconds - the phased array instantly flips from east to west and acquires the new in-view satellite in microseconds. There's no degradation in almost all 'flips' especially if the U.T. has an unobstructed view of the sky.

Some of their use-case they are crowing about on their site cover temporary things: back haul for major-but-temporary events, tethered-drone-mounted units for emergency disaster recover where a cell site is taken out etc. Those are the sorts of things where laying fibre 20km for use for just a day or two just isn't going to happen, but a temporary laser link that you can get up and running in a hour or two would be great.

What kind of data rates and distances are they talking about that isn't served by existing products? For example, you can buy a 20km range, 2Gbps wireless point to point link for a flat $3000 today: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wireless-airfiber-ptp/pr...

What they mention in the article is up to 20Gbps, but they'd have to be pretty dang cheap to out compete just buying 10 of the existing options.

Elsewhere in the thread it suggests ~$30k for one link. Which is exactly in line with buying 10 of the ubiquiti devices.

But I think you would need 20 of them, 10 on each end? Plus extra install, networking equipment, etc. Which would make Taara significantly better.

The issue is that you can't put 10 of your 2 Gbps wireless links next to each other. You quite possibly end up with < 2 Gbps as interference kills your signals (unless you put the transceivers so far apart from one another that you sort of defeat the purpose). That said there are other wireless solutions that can get you > 10 Gbps over > 20 km already (not sure about 20 Gbps, but I wouldn't be surprised). The issue is available spectrum, i.e. you can't just setup the link, because the spectrum doesn't belong to you. Not a problem for optics.

Competition is a good thing. Perhaps now those 3000USD devices will need to be less expensive to remain competitive?

You can say the same thing about running wired ethernet to your TV in the living room. It's simpler and more reliable than wifi. But wifi is much easier and quicker to install. Which one do most people use?

For most users (me included), there is zero difference in user experience between using wifi or Ethernet for their TV. Otherwise, running wired Ethernet would probably be a lot more popular.

So you think. You may be right, but most users won't even realize that a good chunk of their "buffering" / "Internet is slow today" / "Netflix is broken today" problems might just be a WiFi issue, and it would go away if they used a wired connection.

"... very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber."

You end up learning this in your own home. Some things are fine with a wired ethernet connection, it's really only my laptop and phone that use wifi.

The economic burden usually falls on governments, so, like StarLink, Alphabet is probably hoping for some of that sweet, sweet government subsidy/grants for military applications.

I thought this was a link to X(twitter) but this is a Google X

Big tech deserves to burn for their evolution in naming alone.

Bmw would like a word: BMW M760Li xDrive V12 Final Edition

And also squatting on the i3 name because one of these is not like the other https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bmw+i3+2020&iax=images&ia=images vs https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bmw+i3+edrive+35l&iax=images&ia=im...

I mean, seriously, there are more numbers available

Is that a gaming monitor?

Fwiw, Google X predates the Twitter -> X rename by more than a decade.

Apparently the biggest problems are line of sight interruptions and cost:

> The team has figured out how to compensate for potential line-of-sight interruptions like bird flights, rain, and wind. (Fog is the biggest impediment)

> “It’s fast and reliable but quite expensive.” He says he spent around $30,000 for the last light bridge setup he bought from Alphabet for testing.

Interesting that Meta was working on similar tech but abandoned the project:

Google’s Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by Light

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-google-taara-chip-inte...

More on Meta's internet via lasers project:

https://www.wired.com/2016/01/facebook-zuckerberg-internet-o...

Line of sight issues are simply a wattage issue. A gigawatt laser is impervious to rain, a bird, a flock of birds, a bird and the tree it sitting in. Probably the entire forest. Let’s just say there are some solutions well in hand.

I like your first sentence as a truism.

It does have a lot of potential.

"At once, the planets stood between us, forever occluding what we yearn to see.

For existence itself could not repent, the time we spent, and yet

Only whence wielding wattage whole had we defined;

-- an oculus toward which we'd partake of thine.

To space and time, no morphisms apply, no longer shall ye escape our Eye."

$30,000 is quite nuts when you can buy a 71 to 86 GHz band, 10 Gbps full duplex radio bridge for under $6000 today. And it'll likely not completely collapse and fail to link at 1.2 km in moderate rain.

I was on a patio halfway up a tall building in the City in London, when a guy came out of the office I’d been consulting in and asked me if I wouldn’t mind moving a metre to the left as I was blocking the laser. Turned out that the cheapest and fastest way they’d found to set up a secure network with their sister office in another building a couple of hundred metres away was to set up a laser network. It just happened that line-of-sight was unfortunately obstructable by a six-foot-plus man eating a sandwich. This would have been 2012 / 2013?

When I came to Silicon Valley in the early 2010s and realized that all of the king's horses and all of the king's men could not defeat the scourge that is the US ISP oligopoly even in their own backyards, I knew it was pointless to ever hope for real FTTH in Bay Area markets in the next couple of decades.

Wireless solutions have orders of magnitude less bandwidth than fiber, and you can run lots of fiber in a bundle, whereas there's limited spectrum and only one already-saturated RF environment going wireless.

Only in the past few months has Comcast (the only actual high-speed internet option in our fairly typical Silicon Valley suburban neighborhood of ~$2.5m average homes) deigned to offer upload speeds greater than the previous 35mbit cap...now we can push 200mbit for $120/mo (for 1.2tb monthly combined U+D, add $20 for "unlimited") and you usually have to buy a new modem even if your old one supported the tech, since they only support specific firmware on specific SKUs. Meanwhile, GFiber is offering 8gbps symmetrical for $150/mo unmetered.

Reminder also that Ricochet was wireless internet in 1994 on 900mhz ISM using FHSS in the Valley. Ooh how far we've come in 30 years.

In Silicon Valley, in a neighborhood of $2.5M homes, and thus household incomes on average of probably $600k+. It should be possible to get a fiber rollout, they aren't that expensive. Make a neighborhood ISP, or try and get a municipal ISP.

I seem to recall a few different "if we get this many signed up" flyers (more East Bay than South) trying to organize something along those lines - maybe the name was Compass? Also try Sonic and see if they have anything for you.

I've had ATT gigabit fiber for ~6(?) years now. And for the first time ever (started with a 300 baud modem in 1985), similar to recent CPU releases, don't feel a compelling need to upgrade. In fact, would consider 0.5 Gbps if it offered substantial savings, since we don't fully use 1 GB. But no caps, and getting measured throughput of 850+ MB/s for $85 (started at $70) is affordable (for SV) and has been very reliable other than when the very-early transceiver they installed (I was one of the first to get it) got waterlogged and shorted out - the replacement was installed indoors, so that won't happen again.

I'm not a fan of ATT's corporate policies by any means. But the alternatives are, well.. Comcast with a much worse service (not symmetrical) or some flavor of 5G.

People want their nice neighborhood of 2.5 m homes where 100% of utilities are underground and aesthetically pleasing. While people in ordinary neighborhoods in Japan with 100% aerial fiber on utility poles have far superior fiber based last mile ISP service.

Santa Cruz has one.

Silicon Valley is an aberration due to its low housing density. Places with more apartments and condos are much more likely to have infrastructure improvements since you can reach a lot more customers with a lot less money.

I live a little north of you, and had Webpass (wireless) in 2012 - $50/mo for 100 Mbps. Now it's $70/mo for 1 Gbps, but I'm with another wireless ISP for $35/mo for 500 Mbps.

It goes both way doesn't it.

I've looked up some non-shitty parts of the UK with 1gb/1gb fibre for about $40 a month (Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol ect) and all do seem to have population densities about twice that of Silicon Valley.

Then again my village with a population of about 300 does as well so i think it comes down to centralised investment.

Does state or federal not offer incentive to connect low density communities for the good of teh wider economy?

Here in North Texas a lot of the area has less density than a lot of the bay area, average incomes aren't as high, home values aren't nearly as high. And yet a large portion of the population is served by fiber to the home with 1-5Gbit symmetrical speeds available.

The internet is already over lasers, but I guess this is a free space thing.

This looks like the infrared laser system that I worked on at a startup from 1980-1992. That system would create a full-duplex link running at either E1 or T1 speeds, with a distance limit of about 1 mile. I remember there were about a dozen systme shipped worldwide. There was one in canada. Another was sold to Alameda County, Calif. Another made a 2-path jump between some high-rises in New York City. Still another was in Malasia, used by a bank. There was also one that was located to straddle the Texas-Mexico border for a Chtsler factory to allow communications between the two factories and it wasn't 'legal' to string a cable between the buildings wuith the border being between. That one was frequently getting sent back to me for 'repair', the biggest issue being vandalism of the attached rifle scopes on the Mexico side. Which then required new rifle scopes, and a re-calibration on our field in Golden, Colo. Our company was named Telecommunication Products Inc., which was bought out by a company that was deeply involved in leasing TV-service to hotels. That's when the laser really died.

Some typos(sorry): "Canada", "Chrysler".

What's so innovative about this? The distance? Some sort of mesh routing? Point-to-point optical wireless links have been available commercially for quite a while.

They're claiming 10x longer distance than other FSO links I've seen.

I think it's the solid state optical beam steering.

Wait, "Google X" is now just known as "X"? So there is a separate "X" from Alphabet and "X" from tweet all day guy?

Since 2016 [0]

[0]: https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/18/technology/google-x-new-log...

What this means is that in the next 5 years Microsoft will name 3 different things X.

They only need 1 more to hit that, since they got 2 in the Xbox Series X.

. . . and put them in a box.

The most peculiar detail: at the bottom of https://x.company website in the socials column they literally have a link "X (not us)" to https://www.twitter.com/theteamatx

Is line of sight light spectrum subject to any permissions/licensing like radio/microwave? If not, that is significant.

how do you license ... light?

How do you license focused beams of microwaves? Supposedly in some jurisdictions, if you aim a microwave beam across the window to another building, you need a license. (Because the telco monopolist has has some government bureaucrats in their back pocket or something.) Could you get around this if it's light?

People will license anything. Something you can get over the counter in one country needs a prescription in another.

I wouldn't put it past the FCC to require a license for your car headlights if you hook a transceiver up to them.

It is not, like the THz band, which is why it’s very interesting for telecommunications. There is more bandwidth available in a tinier part of the spectrum. It’s like comparing the ipv4 address space to the ipv6 address space. And no license required.

The second episode of the Google Moonshot podcast covers this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLaYGw5_PE0

Is this optical phased array beam steering hardware supposed to be affordable for ISPs such as Monkeybrains to use for end users, or is this just for backhaul connections?

Great for space

Ironically Xerox Parc experimented with network over laser more than 5 decades ago

Damn I need to look into whatever else they were testing

This is great. My WiFi is provided by a microwave link - it’s good but expensive.

It’ll go down at the first sign of rain. We’ve been there with microwave internet.

That's an incredibly insightful observation, I'm sure they've never considered that and will be really disappointed the first time there's rain or fog.

The implication being that you know more about this technology than then people building it and funding it.

Being that I've not seen an actual technology relase from this company so far it's up to them to quell the doubts.

What about Waymo?

Neat demo. When are they shipping?

It's a service in operation now.

At one point we bought a fancy (for the time) microwave link to cover a distance of about 3km. We specifically asked whether it would be affected by weather conditions. We were assured multiple times in the most confident of terms that it would not be a problem, the technology was tested and such eventualities accounted for with various features and failsafes.

The thing proceeded to go down every time it rained, and no amount of tweaking settings, power, phase, polarity or orientation helped. This is the manufacturer/vendor doing the tweaks, mind you, not clueless me (I wouldn’t dream of touching this arcane technology I knew nothing about).

In the end we ditched the microwave and went with a good old copper link which worked without a hitch regardless of the weather.

So since you are, in your own sarcastic way, asking how I know, this is how: from experience. I don’t know about the technology but I do know about when they promise you it will work in the rain.

Rain fade is sort of a solved problem in microwave comms [1]. Earlier than that, it was predictable.

Laser comms aren’t going to be useful in Houston. They’ll probably be a game changer for swarms of drones at altitude, anything in space and the sorts of arid, weather-stable places we like to build data centres.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_fade

Did I misunderstand or are the solutions:

A) Up the power and blast through

B) Use a different suboptimal frequency with much lower bandwidth

Neither seem like actual solutions...

By the way you say you "bought a fancy microwave link" it sounds like you were bamboozled by the vendor. Exactly what manufacturer, model of radios, antenna configuration and other configuration was this that failed to work in rain?

That happens all the time. A random person on the internet predicted the iPhone 4 antennagate problem before it got released. Everyone on the planet who plays videogames knew the Xbox One announcement was suicide and we were right.

Plus there's the possibility they're well aware of this problem but are going full steam ahead anyway.

I know nothing about this technology but there are ways to get around similar issues. For example, twisted pair cables encode data as the DIFFERENCE between the two signals as those signals should be affected by the same noise sources. They could also transmit multiple redundant flows and error correct on the other side with a voting protocol or checksumming.

Fog is a bigger problem, it says here. (Also heavy snow, per the RONJA link in the other comment.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_optical_wireless_co...

This problem was possibly solved in the ten years since it defeated those four or five startups? Or not solved, who can say.

The differential signalling only helps if the noise offsets both signals in the same direction though. If it just attenuates (which fog for example will do to optical signals), it won’t help you. And the other method you described could work (depending on the SNR of course, at some point effectively no signal will come through the fog) but will lower data rate.

I haven't heard of microwave internet. Any recommended readings?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_transmission

They seem to take poor weather condition into account as they reserve an amount of power to keep the link up and stable (equipment would be capable of pushing up to 75km) Those were data from first tests they did, might be interesting if they can confirm that in future updates.

My Monkeybrains connection stays up (albeit with low-to-moderate packet loss) in the heaviest rain San Francisco has to offer. Granted, that's what folks would call light-to-moderate rain... but that's a LOT more rain than suggested by "the first sign of rain".

There's no mention of Starlink, the main competitor (not fiber).

Whenever I travel and see the high latencies in hotel, I'm waiting for being able to Starlink from my mobile phone.

It requires huge antennas on the satellites, but we're getting closer to that with every Strarship launch.

starlink is a competitor of T_Mobile, not Taara. Taara is just a supplier for T-Mobile (example).

This doesn't work in fog. Space lasers are great. No fog. Everyone wants the 500 Terahertz frequencies to work because bandwidth. They have about 25,000 times the carrying capacity of say 20 Ghz. The lower Ghz stuff penetrates weather to varying degrees. Visible light not so much unless it's a vacuum which is perfect. They should move their nodes into space. Oh wait someone already did that.

It's not only fog. Depending on pupil size it can also be rain. But during my thesis 10y ago one of the big limitation on horizontal line of sight laser telecommunication was scintillation due to turbulence. And this phenomenon appear in clear weather condition with heat. So it was limited in clear and sunny weather. I don't know what up time did there expect ? But the bandwidth should fluctuate a lot.

Thanks

> overcoming the stubborn connectivity gaps that prevent nearly 3 billion people from accessing the internet.

I doubt it's really that big number. There will always be a gab because... toddlers and kids <5 years old don't use internet.

> toddlers and kids <5 years old don't use internet

that's wishful thinking

I certainly am missing the point --- targeting internet with electromagnetic waves isn't exactly new technology?

https://www.dfmg.de/en/our-benefits/radio-relay-links.html https://www.dfmg.de/de/unsere-leistungen/richtfunkanbindunge...

so now instead of electromagnetic waves it's light?

what am I missing?

Different frequencies I gathered? Lasers are more like lines than radio that is more like waves on a pond.

Lasers need line of sight.

Wait. Is this why twitter got rebranded; a billionaires pissing match and brand confusion?

The goggles, they do nothing!

Ah, the sci-fi tight beam.

oh... X.company is not X fka Twitter

In the footer of the website they link to their profile: "X (not us)"

Does anyone else find it sus that the VC firm is called Series X Capital? Sounds kinda Google X related.

Unfortunately anyone out of Google is not ambitious enough. They can't execute. Tiny steps don't accomplish anything.

.. tiny steps don't accomplish anything? Do you think tech innovations spring out of nowhere? What do you think about Waymo?

Slow R&D is fine for innovation for sure, Waymo mostly completed the R&D part, similar to the stage I presume Taara is at. The difficult part is then scaling it up into a large self-sustaining business. The hard economics realities tend to come about quickly after that and competition starts nipping at your heels.

Google itself replaced many of the early big name search pioneers like Altavista.

> In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air...

If the light is "invisible" then is it even light? I looked it up and it's infrared.

Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never say "it's emitting infrared light", would you?

Or do they just not want to use the word "radiation" in their marketing, because that sounds scary and cancer-causing?

I'm just curious, since "invisible light" immediately jumped out to me as a contradiction in terms.

> Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never say "it's emitting infrared light", would you?

Yes, we do. No, it's not. Yes, they do. Yes, I would.

People really say "it's emitting x-ray light" or "emitting radio light"?

I've never in my life heard that. That sounds completely wrong to my ears. (Which is why "invisible light" sounded so wrong, too.)

You are right that people more frequently say x-ray radiation. But it's the same thing. It's literally the same thing, just at a different frequency. In the same way that we have words for ice, water, and steam, but they're still the same thing, just at different temperatures.

While "X-ray light" or "radio light" have never been used in any widespread terminology, the existence of "invisible light" has become known at the beginning of the 19th century, when the terms "infrared light" and "ultraviolet light" have been coined for it.

"Invisible light" is light that is invisible for humans, but which is visible for many animals and for many of the devices that are designed to detect visible light. Traditionally, "invisible light" was distinguished from X-rays (with higher frequency) and radiant heat (with lower frequency), because those required different kinds of emitting and detecting devices than those designed for light.

In the traditional terminology, "ultraviolet" and "infrared" are abbreviations for "ultraviolet light" and "infrared light", so ultraviolet and infrared were definitely always classified as kinds of light.

However, what was initially called "infrared light" is what is called now "near infrared". What is called now "far infrared" was traditionally called "radiant heat", which is a term that dates from before it became understood that both radiant heat and light are electromagnetic waves.

The traditional divisions between radio waves, radiant heat, light and X rays were determined by the fact that each of these 4 required different kinds of emitting and detecting devices. However the evolution of technology has extended the ranges for each kind of emitter and detector, so now the ranges of the corresponding kinds of devices are overlapping, so any precise thresholds in the frequency ranges are only conventional.

The usual distinction between "light" and "non-light" is based on the underlying mechanism by which photons are being produced. Photons produced by electrons jumping between energy shells are what we call "light".

By that definition, UV and infrared are "light". Light that's outside of the visible range for our eyes, but still potentially visible to other camera sensors (and some other animals).

X-rays are not "light" because they're emitted by the atomic nucleus itself, rather than by electrons changing orbitals.

Radio waves are not "light" because they're created by macroscopic-scale movement of electrons back and forth in free space.

Yes, light is any transmission of photons, and the visible spectrum is only a tiny slice of that.

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