Aalyria, a space Internet startup with nearly a decade's worth of intellectual property from Alphabet

Has Aalyria's optical transmission technology eliminated the space-Earth communication bottleneck?

Aalyria, a new space Internet company, just burst out of stealth mode. It is based on work done on Alphabet's "moonshot" Project Loon and Alphabet transferred almost a decade’s worth of technology IP, patents, office space, and other assets to Aalyria in return for an equity stake in the company. Spacetime is Aalyria's intelligent network orchestration technology and Tightbeam is its advanced atmospheric laser communications technology.

Spacetime

Loon balloons floated at an altitude of 18-25 km, above
birds and the weather. They navigated by moving up or
down to catch wind currents moving in different directions.

Spacetime is a multi-layer, multi-orbit, software-defined networking system that was developed for Project Loon, one of Google's early efforts at connecting rural areas and developing nations. At one time, Telesat had agreed to use the Google networking system to link their low-Earth orbit and geostationary satellites, but Telesat has not yet launched its LEO constellation.

With the demise of Project Loon, the network management software was orphaned, but development continued and Aalyria says it now "optimizes and continually evolves the antenna link scheduling, network traffic routing, and spectrum resources -- responding in real-time to changing network requirements." That sounds like a tall order with constantly moving satellites, planes, ships, and vehicles, but the foundation was laid with drifting balloons.

This is an impressive claim, but it is not unique. Others are working on multi-orbit broadband networks and OneWeb recently signed an agreement for seamless interoperability between their low-Earth orbit satellites, Intelsat geosynchronous satellites, and airplanes. 

Tightbeam

Source

Tightbeam is a different story -- optical links are beginning to be used between satellites in space, but as far as I know, no one is currently transmitting production volume optical data between satellites and Earth. Optical communication is winning out over radio frequency links in space because they are faster, more secure, and harder to jam than radio frequency and the terminals have lower mass and consume less power. What's not to like? Unfortunately, rain, clouds, dust, or heat distort and attenuate optical signals.

One can imagine building ground stations in places with dry climates and routing around bad weather when it occurs, but Aalyria says they have developed novel hardware and algorithms that correct for these distortions enabling them to transmit data through the atmosphere at speeds up to 1.6 terabits per second over hundreds of miles.

Recently capacity limitations have slowed Space Starlink, triggering a shift to affordability-based pricing, and performance has continued to decline since that time. Over-subscription in a local area or cell contributes to that decline, but, as Mike Puchol points out, the scarcity of radio frequency spectrum for traffic between satellites and terrestrial gateways is also a constraint. Gateway congestion is already a problem and Starlink and others are planning to launch many more satellites. Puchol predicts that we will have optical links between satellites and gateways and speculates that they may use ultraviolet frequencies. The Chinese are also working on optical communication and they have conducted satellite-ground high-speed laser tests.

Regardless of who does it first, we will eventually see optical links between satellites and the ground. I've not seen any description of Tightbeam technology or results of tests and demonstrations, but if Aalyria's technology lives up to its description, it is important.

Miscellaneous 

A few miscellaneous points.

• I don't know where the name Aalyria comes from. I Googled it and only got references to the company itself. (There were tons of hits -- the company is hot).
• I wonder if they plan to operate their own constellation or license the technology. I suspect that the prospective broadband licensees already have their own "Spacetime" but not their own "Tightbeam." At some point, Aalyria (or Amazon, Microsoft, or Google) will roll out optical ground stations.
• My guess is that Tightbeam was developed by Alphabet project Taara which had been working on optical communication for Loon and other applications.
• I tried for a couple of days to get more information on Tightbeam and its performance? Technical papers, experimental results, patents, etc. but email to Aalyria.com bounces.
• Finally, I notice that the Board of Advisors has eleven members, four of which have prior Defense Department experience. That may have helped Aalyria secure an initial $8m contract with the Defense Innovation Unit. Another member is Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, a Google VP, and most relevant in this context, a long-time proponent of interplanetary networking. Only one employee is listed as an optics engineer, but Board member Dr. Donald A. Cox III is an optical communications expert.

Update 10/8/2022

Tim Deaver, VP of Strategic Solutions at Mynaric says they are working on space-ground, air-ground, and ground-ground terminals. Will they be able to write terminal drivers and have them work in a Spacetime network?

Update 9/30/2023

Aalyria CTO Brian Barritt described and demonstrated Spacetime in a terrific keynote talk at the Satellite 2033 conference. He reviewed SpaceTime's history, scope, and features, but the highlight of the talk was a live demonstration of a hypothetical network with mobile and fixed assets on the ground, sea, air, LEO, and the Moon. Stay tuned for a promised Fall update presentation on Tightbeam.

SpaceX introduces affordability based Starlink pricing

GDP per capita, 2022 (Source)

These are the first Starlink price or service changes, but they won't be the last.

When SpaceX announced the price of the Starlink service, Elon Musk said it would be the same everywhere but I wrote that eventually it would be priced to be affordable in different nations. (If you predict enough things, you are bound to get something right).

The fixed cost of a satellite Internet constellation is high -- satellites are expensive to make and launch -- but the cost of adding and servicing a new customer is low and the market is global. At the initial price of $500 for the terminal and $99 per month for the service, there would be unused capacity in poor nations and contention for limited capacity in wealthy nations.

Earlier this summer, we were seeing complaints that Starlink sales were straining capacity in parts of the U.S. and Canada, and last month SpaceX announced variable pricing and an optional service cap in France. That was dubbed a pilot study, but since then the variable pricing dam burst, and customers in many nations received notification of permanent price cuts because of "local market conditions" and "parity in purchasing power." 

A 56% service price cut in Brazil

This change has been discussed on Reddit and a user established a crowd-sourced database of Starlink terminal and service charges by nation. As of this writing, the database contains complete records for thirty-nine nations. The average terminal price, including shipping, is $493.99, and the average monthly service charge is $72.65. In eight nations, the service charge has been cut by over 50%. In general, service charge cuts are greater than terminal price cuts since SpaceX is already subsidizing terminal purchases. (The database is currently a shared Excel spreadsheet, but I would like to see a cleaned-up version as a page on Wikipedia or better yet on the Starlink Web site).

These are the first Starlink price or service changes, but they won't be the last. The technology, the product mix, and the market will continuously change, and SpaceX will eventually encounter competition in the non-residential satellite broadband market. They will need data-driven Ph.D. marketing managers to set prices, not MBAs.

Update 1/3/2023

Source

Ookla reports crowd-sourced speed tests for Starlink every quarter. As seen here, performance in the U. S. has dropped in the last three reported quarters.