Why not take the same strands of light that already power the world’s fiber-optic cables and let them travel freely through the air?
When Telstar 1, the first ever communications satellite, launched back in 1962, it brought home the idea of true global connectivity. That lone satellite may have predated the internet, but it set the new global standard for sharing information around the world. Today, there are roughly 10,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, the majority of which are used to carry our data, connect our calls, and let us hangout virtually with friends, family, and colleagues anywhere they happen to be. Or almost anywhere.
The International Telecommunication Union estimates that 2.6 billion people — around a third of the world’s population — still lack internet access, usually in remote places with challenging geographies or poor infrastructure. It’s difficult to dig cable trenches through a rocky ridge or lay fiber through canyons, rivers, and oceans. But by lifting the network skyward, satellite technology promised to solve this problem, connecting mountain villages, island communities, and other remote regions with signals from orbit. And in lots of ways, satellites have succeeded – a constellation of machines circling the planet, able to bypass the expensive work of trenching fiber or building terrestrial towers. Yet the closer you look, the clearer the trade-offs become. Coverage alone does not equal performance, and the realities of physics are not so easy to shake off.
Signals sent to space and back must travel hundreds of kilometers, introducing unavoidable latency. Each satellite’s broad beam is also shared among thousands of users, diluting bandwidth as demand rises. If someone else joins your network, that’s less bandwidth for you. That’s why buffering and congestion remain common, particularly as more people rely on these systems for bandwidth-heavy tasks like video streaming, telemedicine, and cloud services. Even satellite providers acknowledge that their model isn’t that well-suited for dense urban environments where traffic demands are highest. As time goes on, technologies like AI and our increased reliance on streaming and real-time data transfer have exposed the limitations of satellite technology. It provides unmatched coverage, but it’s fundamentally constrained when it comes to delivering the kind of high-capacity, low-latency connections that modern economies demand.
The physics of light
Satellites broadcast in broad strokes, casting wide cones of coverage from hundreds of kilometers above Earth. That reach is impressive, but it comes at a cost. Signals unavoidably have to travel to orbit and back, adding latency, while the spectrum is sliced into smaller and smaller shares for each user in the coverage zone. Now imagine swapping that floodlight in the sky for a spotlight on the ground – a beam so precise it can trace a straight line between two towers and carry data between them at the speed of light. That’s the essence of wireless optical communication. Not a broad wash of coverage, but a deliberate, targeted connection with minimal latency and gigabits of capacity focused exactly where it’s needed.
These invisible highways of light can carry up to 20 gigabits per second across 20 kilometers, with fiber-like latency that clocks in at just a few milliseconds. Where orbit spreads resources thin, light concentrates them, and it’s sparking a fundamental reevaluation of how we move data: precision over breadth, performance over reach, and capacity where it’s needed most.
From optical fiber to optical lasers
It’s a simple idea when you break it down: Why not take the same strands of light that already power the world’s fiber-optic cables and let them travel freely through the air? It sounds almost too straightforward, but that’s exactly what makes it so practical. For decades, expanding broadband meant trenching roads, tearing up sidewalks, and laying miles of cable under city streets across rivers. Like satellites, wireless optical communication bypasses all of that – but without the issue of latency. Two compact terminals, mounted on rooftops or towers, can light up a connection with the same capacity as a buried fiber line, but without months of permitting, disruption, or construction costs.
Of course, this idea isn’t new. Earlier attempts at free space optics before the technology had fully matured, never lived up to that promise. Beams would drift with tower sway, flicker in heavy wind, or drop out when a bird crossed its path. Some of those issues persist, but today’s systems are combatting them. They use real-time corrections to keep the beam locked steady, compensating for movement, vibration, and environmental interference. They have redundancy built in, so that when a connection drops or packets are lost, they’re re-sent so quickly that a user won’t perceive any drop in service.
In the lab, engineers have already stacked lasers to reach 160 Gbps, proving there’s virtually no upper ceiling when it comes to harnessing the power of light. Satellites will remain part of the connectivity mix for sure, especially for remote coverage, but the future of high-capacity backhaul is right here on Earth – invisible grids of light-linked towers that can connect homes and businesses in ways that are faster, cheaper, and ultimately more scalable than anything orbiting our planet.
