Internet at the speed of light

Summary

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Click Here – “Internet at the Speed of Light”

Podcast: Click Here (Recorded Future News)
Episode Date: October 10, 2025
Host: Dina Temple Raston
Guest: Mahesh Krishna Swamy

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Episode Overview

This episode explores bold new attempts to bring high-speed Internet to underserved areas—not by laying cables or launching satellites, but beaming data through the air using lasers. Host Dina Temple Raston sits down with Mahesh Krishna Swamy, a trailblazer behind this technology, who recounts his personal journey from struggling to access the web in India to developing laser Internet links at Google and beyond. The conversation is a mix of technical ingenuity, entrepreneurial grit, amusing field stories (monkeys included), and a compelling vision for a more connected world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mahesh’s Early Internet Experiences and Motivations

• Background: Growing up in Chennai, India, Mahesh had minimal access to the Internet, which sparked his fascination and drive to innovate in connectivity.
  • “I Had to save a lot of money to kind of get a seat at this Internet cafe and get online using a very slow modem…” (03:25)
• The Internet as an Atlas: The web was a window to the world—helping him research universities and navigate his journey to the US.

2. From Arrival in America to Big Tech Innovator

• Perseverance: Mahesh’s story of losing his passport and all his luggage (including his only winter coat) immediately upon arrival in America, and how this set the stage for “learning perseverance and entrepreneurship.” (05:04)
• Google Moonshots: Discussion of Project Loon at Google X—floating stratospheric balloons to deliver Internet to remote places.
  • “So Project Loon was a Google X project which was working on using stratospheric balloons... It’s like a floating cell tower.” (05:27)

3. Genesis of Laser-Based Internet (Terra)

• Rethinking Moonshot Tech: After grappling with poor Internet on family visits back to India, Mahesh’s father challenged him to solve it.
  • “If you really are so passionate about this, why don’t you do something about it?” (06:21)
• Core Idea: Use the same technology as balloon-to-balloon links, but on the ground: laser terminals on poles rather than cables underground.
  • “What if we use some of the technology that is used between these balloons? ...All you need is a pole and a bucket of concrete and then start connecting people.” (06:43)
• Technical Principle: Laser beams “the size of a chopstick” aim at tiny receivers, enabling “Internet at the speed of light, lowest possible latency, and at the cheapest possible way.” (00:42, 07:02)

4. Real-World Proof & Adventures

• The Accidental Demo: During an Indian conference (2016), the main fiber-optic line failed. Mahesh’s team rerouted live Internet across a river using their test system, wowing government officials.
  • “We turned down the link from one side of the river and beamed Internet over to this conference room… we were able to bring this entire conference room back online.” (09:39)
• Disaster Response: After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, these laser terminals restored connectivity to key community hubs.
  • “We were able to relay and bring connectivity to a town, to a grocery store, to a university center and the Mayor’s office.” (10:49)
• Crossing Borders: Using laser links to span the Congo River, connecting two countries that would otherwise need hundreds of miles of fiber laid. (11:04)

5. Challenges: Monkeys, Weather, and Competition

• Unlikely Obstacles: From tropical storms to animals interfering with equipment on rooftops and towers.
  • “Dozens of monkeys causing massive amounts of outages. And we couldn’t even reach and fix this terminal because these monkeys are extremely territorial.” (01:29, 11:41)
• Continuous Improvement: Each outage (animal-caused or not) leads to tech enhancements like “two stage compensation” for better tracking and stability. (12:02)
• Competitive Landscape: Competing with Starlink, fiber, and classic infrastructure—all in the race to bring reliable, affordable Internet everywhere.

6. Personal Stakes and Family Ties

• Father’s Approval: Mahesh’s father now has a Terra terminal—though he remains a demanding customer.
  • “So does he call you and say, what’s going on with my terror?”
    Mahesh: “I literally got back, yeah, this week from India and I was getting a year full from him about that.” (12:35-12:39)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Laser Internet, in a Nutshell:
  “Laser based Internet. The laser beams are the size of a chopstick and they are pointing at literally a grain of rice several kilometers away.”
  — Mahesh Krishna Swamy (00:42)

• Perseverance as Fuel:
  “That was kind of a rough ride to kind of come into the United States. But that’s basically how I started to learn perseverance and entrepreneurship.”
  — Mahesh (05:04)

• Necessity Breeds Invention:
  “Necessity is the mother of all invention.”
  — Mahesh (12:48)

• On Monkeys as Adversaries:
  “There were dozens of monkeys which were swinging on the tower where we installed our terminal, causing massive amounts of outages.”
  — Mahesh (11:41)

• Dina on the Personal Revolution:
  “Because this was never about infrastructure, it was about recreating that first moment. In a crowded Internet cafe when the world came rushing in. And about his father.”
  — Dina Temple Raston (12:10)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:42 – Mahesh explains the dinner party metaphor: laser Internet and practical potential.
• 03:25 – Mahesh recalls his first Internet experience in India.
• 05:04 – Story of arriving in the US with nothing, learning perseverance.
• 05:27 – How Project Loon aimed to solve global connectivity from the sky.
• 06:43 – The “aha” moment: bring laser communication tech down to earth.
• 09:39 – The accidental proof-of-concept during a government Internet outage.
• 10:49 – Rebuilding communications after Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria.
• 11:41 – The monkey problem on rural towers.
• 12:35 – Mahesh’s father becomes a (demanding) customer.

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Tone & Style

The conversation is approachable, humorous, and human-centered, making complex technology accessible while spotlighting the personal stakes and quirks of innovation. Mahesh’s journey is one of persistence, resourcefulness, and family ties—never far from the humble Internet café where it all began.

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Conclusion

“Internet at the Speed of Light” offers a hopeful look at the future of global connectivity—a blend of AI, laser physics, and old-fashioned problem-solving (sometimes, with monkeys). For Mahesh Krishna Swamy and others in this space, the mission is clear: open the world, one invisible beam at a time.

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Transcript

[Dina Temple Raston]

Chatgpt AI Machine Satellite engine ignition. Click here and lift up. From recorded future news and prx, this is Click Here's Mic Drop. A longer listen to one of our favorite conversations of the week. I'm Dina Temple Raston. Earlier this week we told you how hard it still is to get everyone in the US online. Today we meet someone with a very different idea of how to do it. When you explain this at a dinner party, what's the metaphor you use that gets people to sort of nod along?

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

Laser based Internet. The laser beams are the size of a chopstick and they are pointing at literally a grain of rice several kilometers away. You can deliver Internet at the speed of light, at the lowest possible latency, and at the cheapest possible way.

[Dina Temple Raston]

I was going to say you probably have dinner with a lot of engineers. Mahesh Krishna Swamy has been working on an Internet that doesn't crawl through cables underground or snake across the ocean floor. Instead, it flies through the air on beams of light. And while it sounds like science fiction, it's really just a remix of older technology. One that comes with some surprisingly analog problems.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

Dozens of monkeys causing massive amounts of outages. And we couldn't even reach and fix this terminal because these monkeys are extremely territorial.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Stay with us.

[Dakota State University Announcer]

Support comes from Dakota State University. What happens when you unite dynamic minds with one revolutionary vision? A rising force on the cutting edge of everything from a little university on the prairie to a cyber powerhouse of the plains. We are proving the nation's best cyber can come from where you least expect it. Now we're molding the future of cyber AI and quantum computing, one graduate at a time. See what Dakota State University is building [e-mail] this show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoodoo.com that's O D O O dot com.

[Dina Temple Raston]

I'm Dina Templewost and this is click here's mic.

[Katie Drummond]

Dr.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Mahesh Krishnaswamy didn't have the Internet growing up in the 1980s. He lived in eastern India, in Chennai. In fact, it wasn't until he was a teenager that he actually experienced the World Wide Web firsthand.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

I Had to save a lot of money to kind of get a seat at this Internet cafe and get online using a very slow modem with all the funny noise of getting online. The pages took forever to load. But once the images loaded, I was fascinated by what I could actually see.

[Recorded Future News Announcer]

Welcome. You've got mail.

[Dina Temple Raston]

And what's the first thing a 16 year old who gets to go on the Internet looks up?

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

Shopping was not on top of my mind at that time. It was all about education and information and knowledge.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Every click was a window onto the wider world. Cities he'd never seen, universities he might one day attend. The Internet became his atlas. He studied how to apply to college abroad, how to get a visa, and then followed the instructions step by step. Finally, he set off in the real world by train, then bus, then cab to the American consulate. And he got a visa. He rushed home to tell his parents.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

I finally got my visa, only to find out that I had lost my passport somewhere within the train ride or the bus ride with a freshly stamped visa.

[Dina Temple Raston]

So he begged for a new passport, got a new visa, and finally made it into the US on a 36 hour flight to Michigan in the middle of winter. It's our pleasure to welcome you to Detroit.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

Please stay seated with your seatbelt fastened. But when he landed, all my luggage, which was all my belongings, completely lost.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Did you have a winter coat?

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

I did not. It was in the luggage.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Wow.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

And so that was kind of a rough ride to kind of come into the United States. But that's basically how I started to learn perseverance and entrepreneurship.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Perseverance that carried him through a master's in electrical and computer engineering and through Jobs at Motorola, Apple, and then Google. At Google, he joined the company's moonshot factory, where they cooked up ideas that seemed impossible.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

So Project Loon was a Google X project which was working on using stratospheric balloons twice the height of commercial airplanes. And they bring connectivity to places that don't have it. And it's like a floating cell tower. I was part of the LOOM team and the leadership team trying to figure out how to make these balloons last longer. How do we make this technology work? And one of the ideas I had is like, what if you get to send balloons from the United States all the way to India? Unfortunately, that balloon never made it to Chennai. The closest it got to was to Sri Lanka, way far away from Chennai. And I got a call from my dad saying, this is how you're going to solve connectivity.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Every trip home to Chennai, he saw the same frustrations. Slow Internet, too many users, not enough bandwidth.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

We were literally fighting over a small USB connection in order to get online. And so I would have this heated argument with my dad about why is it so bad? And he challenged me, said, if you really are so passionate about this, why don't you do something about it?

[Dina Temple Raston]

So he did.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

What if we use some of the technology that is used between these balloons? What if we were to take that piece of technology and put it down on the ground? All you need is a pole and a bucket of concrete and then start connecting people.

[Dina Temple Raston]

That was the beginning of Terra beaming the Internet to far corners of the earth with lasers.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

We use beams of light to transmit very high speed data from one point to the other. Basically, we are able to transmit very high speed data over the air, fiber.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Optic speed, without the fiber. At first, even Mahesh didn't believe it could work.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

It was a really dumb idea, I thought at the time, until I actually started to deploy some of these.

[Dina Temple Raston]

When we come back, Mahesh has to prove his idea sooner than he expected and he stumbles into the perils of wind, birds and monkeys. We'll be right back.

[Katie Drummond]

What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too, Katie. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

I want a shark that.

[Katie Drummond]

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

False.

[Katie Drummond]

Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find Wired's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dina Temple Raston]

So it's 2016. Mahesh was at a conference in India about to present Terra. Then the Internet went down.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

I was in a conference room filled with execs, along with the chief minister of the Senate, largest state and the Internet in that room, which was fed by a fiber optic cable, was cut. And they all experienced firsthand what an outage of an Internet looks like. And I said, like, wait a minute, I think I can solve this problem.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Because as it turns out, Mahesh's team had been testing Terra nearby, beaming Internet across a river.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

And that's when we turned down the link from one side of the river and beamed Internet over to this conference room. And then immediately we were able to bring this entire conference room back online.

[Dina Temple Raston]

That accident became proof of concept. And the technology that made it possible were these Terra devices, about the size of a traffic light. Mahesh calls them terminals.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

And all you do is take data from one side and you transmit it, the other side receives it. So they just need to be within watching distance, so they need to be roughly pointing to each other. And then the terminals have internal steering mechanisms and compensation mechanisms to lock onto each other the moment they see each other.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Once the beams lock in, they hold. This wasn't a moonshot anymore. So Mahesh began testing Terra in places where the need was even more urgent. Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Dark days in Puerto Rico, expected to last months after Hurricane Maria was ripped apart the island's entire power grid.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

We basically had no infrastructure left on the ground. All the fiber optic cables, all the radio antennas, everything was shot. We were able to relay and bring connectivity to a town, to a grocery store, to a university center and the.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Mayor'S office, then the Congo River.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

The only alternative for them was to run 400 miles of fiber from across another part where there isn't that it's not as fast flowing. Instead of going through that entire process, we just put out a couple of links and we were able to connect two countries in just a matter of few days.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Today, Terra is live in more than a dozen countries, including the us. But competition is fierce. There's Starlink, there's fiber, and the old enemies of fog, wind and monkeys. There was this one location in India where that turned out to be a big problem.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

There were dozens of monkeys which were swinging on the tower where we installed our terminal, causing massive amounts of outages.

[Dina Temple Raston]

So how do you scale an Internet that monkeys can unplug? MAHESH LAUGHS but the truth is, every outage, every monkey pushes them to improve.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

We went back to our product and said, how do we fix this? How do we fix our pointing and tracking? That's when we have built in two stage compensation.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Because this was never about infrastructure, it was about recreating that first moment. In a crowded Internet cafe when the world came rushing in. And about his father. I read somewhere that your father now has a Terra terminal on his roof in India.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

Yeah, we installed one. It still needs to be lit up from the other side, but we did have it, at least briefly, at my. At my dad's place.

[Dina Temple Raston]

So does he call you and say, what's going on with my terror? Why isn't it working?

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

I literally got back, yeah, this week from India and I was getting a year full from him about that.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Well, at least he challenged you.

[Mahesh Krishna Swamy]

Exactly. And necessity is the mother of all invention.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Fiber, satellites, lasers. Different routes on the same destination. And if Mahesh has anything to say about it, beams of light will soon be part of how the whole world comes Online From Recorded Future News. This has been Click Here's Mic Drop. It was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch, Lucas Riley and me, Dina Templest. It was edited by Karen Duffin. We'll be back on Tuesday with an all new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend.

[Recorded Future News Announcer]

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