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Comment by light_triad | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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?

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.

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