The Invisible Lightness of Beams

Thanks M F

Look! Up in the sky, it's a ... well, actually, you can't see it. But it's there.

A company called Terabeam recently landed in Los Angeles and announced plans to "send invisible light beams through the air downtown."

Hoping to meet some UFO wackos, we trekked to a Wilshire Boulevard skyscraper and passed through a security checkpoint. Ascending to the 20th floor, we were greeted by humanoid creatures who--to our great disappointment--insisted they were from a Seattle suburb, not another galaxy. Even so, Terabeam is an odd enterprise. Founded five years ago by an eccentric inventor, the company delivers high-speed Internet access via laser beams zapped through office windows. It might sound like science fiction, but Terabeam is actually borrowing technology developed by the military during the Cold War, when submarines used blue-green lasers to chat with satellites.

Now, an infrared version of that system is hailed as the solution to a problem that has vexed the telecommunications industry for years. In trying to wire the nation for lightning-fast transmission of movies, voice and other data, companies such as the now-bankrupt Global Crossing have buried thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable. But very few customers have been able to plug into the network. That's because the information superhighway becomes a dirt road inside most cities. Extending fiber-optic power to individual homes and businesses means ripping up streets and sidewalks, a time-consuming process that costs upward of $1 million per mile in downtown areas

News source: LA Times