Optical communications internet company Taara has launched a new "Taara Beam" device that can provide up to 25Gbps data connectivity within cities through invisible beams with extremely low latency. The company just became independent from Alphabet's "Moonshot" incubator last year. This new product focuses on urban "middle-mile" connection scenarios.
Unlike last year's Taara Lightbridge, which was targeted at long-distance scenarios, Taara Beam is mainly targeted at internal deployment in urban areas. Lightbridge is designed to cross geographical barriers such as water and mountains to provide connections between communities at a distance of up to about 20 kilometers; while the newly launched Beam device is about the size of a shoe box and can be installed on street light poles or rooftops for point-to-point links up to about 10 kilometers within urban areas. Taara Beam weighs approximately 8 kilograms (less than 20 pounds) and has a typical power consumption of approximately 90 watts, allowing for quick installation on existing municipal infrastructure.
Taara positions its greatest strengths as speed and deployment efficiency. The company says Beam rivals fiber in throughput but is much faster to deploy, eliminating the need to apply for radio spectrum or dig roads to lay cables and can typically be installed within hours. This also puts it into the "competitive range" with services such as Starlink to a certain extent. However, because the signal does not need to be relayed through satellites, Taara Beam's end-to-end latency can be less than 100 microseconds, far better than any space-based Internet solution.
Although the performance is close to home broadband or enterprise dedicated lines, Taara Beam is not aimed at ordinary consumers, but at enterprises and telecom operators who need to build "mid-haul transmission" networks. For example, it can quickly build backbone links in cities and provide high-speed backhaul capabilities for access networks or edge nodes.
Taara's early product Lightbridge has been deployed in more than 20 countries around the world and is deployed by operators such as T‑Mobile and Airtel to connect remote areas to backbone networks across complex terrain. On this basis, Taara said that it is currently seeing two emerging application scenarios that are particularly "interesting" in Taara Beam: one is to provide high-speed offloading links for smart electric fleets such as electric delivery vehicles and self-driving taxis. When the vehicles are parked for charging, the massive data generated by onboard lidar and sensors are offloaded through beam transmission; the other is to build a high-speed mesh network covering urban intersections to provide infrastructure for low-latency V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communications such as vehicle-road collaboration.
Taara Beam will be officially unveiled at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC 2026) in Barcelona, where Taara will demonstrate this city-level high-speed connection solution based on "invisible beams" to operators and enterprise customers.