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Dabba Laser
The Dabba laser is a compact outdoor laser designed to create a low cost internet backbone reliably and rapidly. It uses free space optical communications to deliver multigigabit speeds over kilometers in distance. The uses of a laser are to deploy lightweight networks in dense urban cities, cross difficult terrain and serve as point-to-point backhaul for 5G towers.
Most internet infrastructure today consists of underground fiber optic cable. While this has worked well in the past, the biggest drawback of this type of infrastructure is the cost and time taken to deploy. Whether laying undersea cables, under highway or railway cables, or underground cables in city streets, the process is always painfully the same. Laying these cables takes enormous amounts of capital, political power, heavy machinery and large labour pools.
This system has worked well enough in the past, but recent advancements in lens and laser technologies allow many of these underground cables to be replaced with faster, cheaper and smaller lasers. Communications via lasers or free space optics has traditionally been the domain of space exploration agencies over the last few decades. They use lasers across the vast distances of space to communicate between the many satellites and spacecraft across our solar system. Starlink for example, uses lasers to communicate between its satellites.
Last modified 30d ago