The Invisible Lightness of Beams
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.
To bypass the roadblock, Terabeam and several competitors are selling “fiber optics without the fiber.” They install space-age laser devices on high-rise rooftops and windowsills, then beam data through the sky, building to building. Think of it as an electronic version of the carrier pigeon, except this “pigeon” hauls enough information to fill a 747 and flies at the speed of light.
Like many a “revolutionary, paradigm-shattering, we-can-be-filthy-rich” technology, this one is stained with red ink. Lucent has poured $450 million into Terabeam, which laid off employees last year; Nortel and Qualcomm are backing rival AirFiber, also unprofitable.
Meanwhile, questions linger. Will the lasers cook birds in mid-flight? Does the system work in fog or through dirty windows? And, can a nearsighted person perform do-it-yourself Lasik eye surgery by staring into the laser?
Terabeam officials have heard these queries before--except the one about do-it-yourself eye surgery. Company boss Dan Hesse, who previously ran AT&T;’s Wireless division, insists the lasers are harmless to birds and humans: “You can look directly into it for as long as you want with no damage to your eye.”
Uh, go right ahead, Dan. We’ll take your word for it.
As for fog and other aerial impediments, Terabeam claims to have eliminated all the bugs. For example, in downtown Seattle, where the company debuted, laser transmitters were spaced close enough to their targets that the beams could slice through the city’s thick fog.
Even when the Kingdome was imploded, the resulting cloud of dust had no effect on Terabeam’s service, said company spokesman Lou Gellos.
But using infrared lasers can still be tricky. For starters, office windows come in hundreds of colors and glass styles, each of which diffuses the light beam differently. Terabeam has a lab that does nothing but test various types of mirrored glass so that the company’s equipment installers can adjust the laser signal accordingly. Of course, they first have to find the beam, which is invisible. For that, Terabeam has developed a hand-held beam detector, which is similar to a stud finder but tracks infrared light.
Terabeam’s customers include Microsoft, Seattle University and four of the city’s big hotels, which use the laser feed to give guests super-quick Internet access.
Speaking of hotel guests, did we mention the Big Brother-style cameras hidden inside each laser unit? During service outages, the cameras relay pictures of the nearest laser transmitter to Terabeam headquarters. Thus, when a Seattle law firm lost service last year, Terabeam trouble-shooters instantly saw the problem: Someone had thrown a coat over the firm’s laser unit.
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Camera Solves Mystery: a Ship-Related Blip
A similar incident happened in New York City after Sept. 11, when Terabeam noticed a momentary blip in service between Merrill Lynch’s Manhattan office and a branch across the Hudson River (Terabeam had set up the link after the attack on the World Trade Center severed underground fiber-optic cables). Trouble-shooters rewound the camera’s tape and saw a Navy cruise ship mast gliding past, briefly blocking the laser.
Does this mean Terabeam can peep into hotel windows via laser units aimed toward the building? At first, a company official acknowledged the possibility: “At some level, yeah, you could see other things [besides the laser unit].” But then he backpedaled, noting that the pictures are “very grainy black and white” and usually focused tightly on the laser unit itself.
“These aren’t super cameras with telescopes,” added spokesman Gellos. “They can only make out basic shapes.” In hotels, only Terabeam’s equipment is visible, he said.
To showcase the advantages of Terabeam’s service, Gellos arranged a quirky demonstration. Sitting in the company’s L.A. office, he flicked on a TV screen linked to Seattle via fiber-optic cable and digital video cameras.
“Anne, are you there?” he said to an empty Seattle office. No reply. A moment later, she materialized, armed with maracas, four TVs and what appeared to be the world’s largest pingpong paddle.
To show how much data a single laser signal can carry, she turned on her TV sets, which began playing four different digital movies piped in on the same invisible light ray that was transmitting her voice and image to Terabeam’s L.A. office. “All of this is coming into my office through this window,” she said, motioning toward a laser unit and the Seattle skyline behind her.
She rattled the maracas for effect, then picked up the giant pingpong paddle and walked to the laser device. Using the paddle like a portable solar eclipse, she began blocking the laser beam. At halfway toward total eclipse, the movies and the videoconference continued flawlessly. But when the beam was 90% blocked, everything froze. Once the paddle was removed, the movies resumed exactly where they left off.
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Service Costs at Least $2,000 a Month
In addition to Seattle, Terabeam operates in Denver, Dallas and now Los Angeles, charging customers a minimum of $2,000 a month for service. Company execs originally hoped to be in dozens of cities by this time, but scaled back drastically as the economy stumbled.
Despite setbacks, the potential market for fiber optics has attracted a variety of entrepreneurs. Some, like Terabeam, use lasers. Others rely on microwave signals. Broadband Highway of Encino uses both. And CityNet Telecommunications runs fiber-optic cable through sewer lines, thus avoiding the cost of digging up streets.
“Out of your toilet comes high-speed Internet access,” says Peter Fuhr, a San Jose State University electrical engineering professor who worked on wireless optics for NASA. “It’s an interesting idea.”
Nobody knows which method has the edge, let alone whether some future technology might make them all obsolete.
Dave Rutledge, who chairs the electrical engineering department at Caltech, was hired by a Terabeam competitor to figure out whether the laser idea is just a passing fad. Forbes magazine sides with the fad contingent. “It sure sounds neat, but it always does at first,” said a May 2000 article critiquing Terabeam.
Even if the concept proves viable, that’s no guarantee it will succeed. As Rutledge noted: “Sometimes, timing is more important than technology. Is this the right time? I don’t know.”
Maybe it would help if the lasers also cleaned the windows of any building they zapped into.
