Alphabet asked a question: “Could we harness the speed of light to deliver data without the need for cables?” The answer, compiled over 7 years, is that it can deliver fast, affordable Internet connectivity by transmitting high-speed data using beams of light through the air using the company’s new Taara chip. Whereas the first-generation technology, the Taara Lightbridge, relied on a system of mirrors, sensors and hardware to steer light physically, the Taara chip uses software to steer, track, and correct the beam of light without bulky moving parts — or a fiber optic wire.

“We’ve taken most of the core functionality of the Taara Lightbridge — which is the size of a traffic light — and shrunk it down to the size of a fingernail,” Alphabet explains in a blog post from its X unit (formerly Google X), also known as the Moonshot Factory, a concept lab focused on experimental projects like the Waymo self-driving cars, Project Loon and the wireless optical science that produced Tara.

The Alphabet lab has “created equipment that can sit on a cell tower and beam light signals through the air, transmitting 20 gigabits per second to another receiver as far as 20 kilometers away,” writes PCMag.

In tests at the Moonshot Factory, the Alphabet team has successfully transmitted data at 10 Gbps over distances of 1 kilometer outdoors using two Taara chips, says X, noting in the blog post that “we believe this is the first time silicon photonics chips have transmitted such high-capacity data outdoors at this distance.”

Transmission using light is known as “free space optics.” Wired says the Taara tech evolved from the X lab’s old Project Loon concept of distributing Internet feeds using airborne balloons. While the Loon project was abandoned, one of the engineers forked off to work on wireless optical communication — “namely, delivering high-bandwidth Internet using laser beams,” explains Wired, adding “think fiber optic without the cables.”

The new Taara chip “contains hundreds of tiny light emitters controlled by software with automatic steering,” Engadget reports, adding that the team is “now looking to improve the chip’s capacity and range by creating an ‘iteration with thousands of [light] emitters,’” with the expectation of making the chip available sometime next year.

“Using chips deployed in a global mesh network, we see opportunities to bring high-speed Internet to underserved regions, rethink the way data centers are built and operated, enable faster, create safer communication for autonomous vehicles, and so much more,” X labs writes, adding that “the possibilities are as boundless as light itself.”