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- [00:03]
Dina Temple Raston
From recorded future news and prx, this is click here. It seems like a given now that the Internet is everywhere. Invisible, instant, always on. But that's not actually true, because in 2026, there are still entire communities where the Internet doesn't really exist. At least not in a reliable way. Not in a way that lets you live your life. And it's not because people chose to opt out or to disconnect. It's actually because the connection never arrived. I'm Dena Temple Rowston, and this is Click Here, a podcast about the people making and breaking our digital world. Today we're updating a story we did about a blind spot in that world. In the United States, nearly a third of rural Americans still don't have broadband at home. Which raises a bigger question. What if the problem isn't just access, but the way the Internet itself is built? Today we meet someone who thinks the fix isn't a patch. It's a redesign, a new kind of Internet. One that's faster, cheaper, and light enough to reach the places the old one now never did. Do you think eventually we'll get to the point where everyone's connected?
- [01:33]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
That's my dream. I'd love to find a way to get everybody access to very high speed, affordable Internet. Almost like the air that we breathe.
- [01:44]
Dina Temple Raston
Mahesh Krishnaswamy is working on an Internet that doesn't run through underground cables. Instead, it moves through the air using beams of laser light. And while that might sound like science fiction, the idea itself isn't new. In fact, it's been around for decades. Stay with us.
- [02:15]
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- [02:46]
Dina Temple Raston
click Here comes from Quince. These days, I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made and versatile, it's just not worth it to me. That's why I love Quince. The fabrics feel elevated, the cuts are thoughtful, and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high quality wardrobe staples using premium fabrics like 100% European linen. 100% silk and organic cotton poplin. And they come directly from safe, ethical factories. They cut out the middleman so you don't pay extra for brand markups. It's just quality clothing at a good price and it's consistently rated 4.5 to 5 stars by thousands of customers. My new favorite sweater, my Quince cashmere quarter zip. I actually find excuses to wear it. It looks great, super soft and it's one of those classic pieces you keep going back to. Right now, if you go to quince.com clickhere you can get free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to wear it and love it. And you will. Now available in Canada. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to q U-I-N-C-E.com clickhere for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com clickhere. For Mahesh, getting online was never that simple. He grew up in Chennai in eastern India and actually didn't experience the Internet until he was a teenager.
- [04:33]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
I have to save a lot of money to get a seat at this Internet cafe and get online using a very slow modem with all the funny noise of getting online.
- [04:47]
Dina Temple Raston
And what's the first thing a 16 year old who gets to go on the Internet looks up?
- [04:52]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
It was all about education and information and knowledge.
- [04:56]
Dina Temple Raston
Every click opened a window. Cities he'd never seen, universities he might one day attend. The Internet became his atlas. He figured out how to apply to college abroad, how to get a visa, and he followed the steps. And eventually he took a train, then a bus and then a cab so he could pick up a visa at the American Embassy. He was going to study in the US. There was a 36 hour flight to Michigan. It's our pleasure to welcome you to
- [05:25]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
Detroit where local time is 8:02. Please stay seated with your seatbelt fastened and your carry on items.
- [05:32]
Dina Temple Raston
It was in the middle of winter when he arrived. There was only one problem. The airline lost its luggage. Did you have a winter coat?
- [05:40]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
I did not. It was in the luggage. 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.
- [05:53]
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, the division devoted to ideas that sound impossible until they aren't. One of those ideas was Project Loon.
- [06:15]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
So Project Loon was a Google X project which was working on using stratospheric balloons, which floats around 20 km, twice the height of commercial airplanes.
- [06:26]
Dina Temple Raston
You wouldn't see much from the ground, but through a telescope, they look like enormous plastic jellyfish drifting across the sky.
- [06:35]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
And they navigate and sail through the vents and are able to bring connectivity to places that don't have it or augment the capacity for some of those places. It's like a floating cell tower.
- [06:48]
Dina Temple Raston
It's called free space optics, a method of sending data through the air using beams of light. In the past, it's been used to link Earth to satellites and spacecraft.
- [06:59]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
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? 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.
- [07:21]
Dina Temple Raston
Every trip home to Chennai, he saw the same frustrations. Slow Internet, too many users, not enough bandwidth.
- [07:28]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
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. He said, like, if you really are so passionate about this, why don't you do something about it?
- [07:50]
Dina Temple Raston
So he did.
- [07:51]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
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?
- [07:59]
Dina Temple Raston
That was the beginning of Terra. Beaming the Internet to far corners of the earth with lasers.
- [08:08]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
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
- [08:20]
Dina Temple Raston
optic speed, without digging fiber. At first, even Mahesh didn't believe it could work.
- [08:26]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
It was a pretty dumb idea, I thought at the time, until I actually started to deploy some of these.
- [08:32]
Dina Temple Raston
When we come back, Mahesh is forced to prove his idea sooner than he planned. We'll be right back. Support for Click here comes from Servil. IT teams waste so much time on repetitive tickets. All those password resets, access requests, and onboarding. With Servil, you can cut 80% of that busy work. So all it has to do is write what they need in plain English and SERVL makes it happen instantly. Consider onboarding. New hires waiting around for days, managers asking for approvals. It gets pulled away from meaningful work. With Servl, a manager can simply request onboarding with a quick slack message. And just like that, access happens in seconds automatically with all the right approvals. It never even has to touch it. If I were starting a tech company, Servol would be a must have. It saves time and money and lets it focus on actual problems. That's why Servol powers the fastest growing companies in the world like Perplexity, Mercore, Verkada and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot@serval.com clickhere that's S E R V A L.com clickhere support for click here comes from Factor this time of year always feels like the hardest time to stay consistent with cooking. There's so much going on and honestly, who wants to run out into the cold just to grab some groceries? Thankfully, Factor makes healthy eating easy with fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs. With Factor you get quality meals with hearty ingredients including lean proteins, colorful veggies and healthy fats. They're meant to fit your goals and they're ready to eat in about two minutes. No prep, no stress, and it never gets boring. They have a hundred rotating weekly options, so there's always something new and delicious to look forward to. Personally, I love their black pepper and sage pork chop and the Thai style peanut chicken grain bowl is perfect for lunch. It keeps you full all day in a good way. Head to FactorMeals.com clickhere50OFF and use the code clickhere50OFF to get 50% off your first factor box plus free breakfast for one year. Eat like a pro this month with Factor new subscribers only. Varies by plan. One free breakfast item per box for one year while subscription is active.
- [11:25]
BBC Narrator
How are weight loss drugs changing our world? In the span of just a few short years, weight loss jabs have become so so prevalent in our culture that they've transformed the way we live, move and eat. Restaurants are serving smaller portions and there's more protein rich food in grocery stores. Does all of this speak to a renewed obsession with skinniness? Listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [12:04]
Dina Temple Raston
In 2016, Mahesh had been working on this new kind of Internet, one that didn't rely on cables in the ground. And he was in India at a conference about to tell people about what he had in mind when he got an unexpected test. Just before he began, the Internet in the room went down.
- [12:22]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
I was in a conference room filled with execs along with the chief minister of the seventh largest state and the Internet in that room, which is fed by a fiber optic cable, was cut, the connection dropped, 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.
- [12:44]
Dina Temple Raston
Because just a few miles away, his team had been testing something. A laser link beaming Internet across a river.
- [12:51]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
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 again.
- [13:02]
Dina Temple Raston
And you didn't do this on purpose?
- [13:04]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
No. No, I did not do this on purpose.
- [13:08]
Dina Temple Raston
That accident became proof of concept. The technology relies on TERA devices, each one about the size of a traffic light. Mahesh calls them terminals. Mount one on two existing towers that can see each other, and they're ready to start transmitting data, not through cables, but through the air, on a beam of light.
- [13:33]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
And they just need to be within watching distance, so they need to be roughly pointing to each other. And then the terminals lock onto each other the moment they see each other.
- [13:42]
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 ripped apart the island's
- [14:01]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
entire power grid, 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
- [14:16]
Dina Temple Raston
mayor's office, then the Congo River.
- [14:19]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
We just put out a couple of links, and we were able to connect two countries in just a matter of few days.
- [14:25]
Dina Temple Raston
When Mahesh and his team first set out to tackle the connectivity problem, they cast a wide net. By terrorist count, roughly a third of the planet remains offline. That's almost 3 billion people. And at first, Mahesh figured the work should begin in places like India and across Africa. But then came COVID 19. Almost overnight, the connectivity gaps he'd been tracking overseas started showing up much closer to home, across the United States. And just as that realization set in, the phone started ringing. Tara started getting calls from across the country. There was just one problem. This Terra technology still had its quirks. The beams, it turned out, were sensitive to weather, especially fog.
- [15:13]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
So anything that disperses light will scatter the beam. So especially if you're going long distances, then it's very difficult to close the links.
- [15:23]
Dina Temple Raston
Wind didn't help either. If the terminal shifted even slightly, the connection could drop. But each failure forced a fix, each outage or refinement. And the calls kept coming. T mobile, Coachella, the music festival, even Google, his former employer, signed on as a customer, using a Terra link to connect buildings on a company campus in California. But Mahesh didn't get into this to wire up tech campuses or music festivals. For him, it was about places like Selah, Washington. Tara got that call from the city in the spring of 2025.
- [16:03]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
The landscape is very difficult. Even if you want to dig in trench, the terrain was very difficult. It's very, very rocky.
- [16:10]
Dina Temple Raston
There was a rusty old cell tower struggling to keep up with demand.
- [16:14]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
I personally went out there, and right there it sunk into me that there is no way they could have ever run any other technology but ours.
- [16:24]
Dina Temple Raston
Sila took a chance on the Terra terminal, and within months, service stabilized, expanding access across entire neighborhoods.
- [16:33]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
Seeing it in live action, serving all of these users was phenomenal. It was actually very reassuring and a testament to the work that we've been doing and what we do.
- [16:49]
Dina Temple Raston
Last year, the Trump administration rewrote the rules for Bead, a federal broadband expansion program. It used to prioritize fiber optic cable projects. Now the program is tech neutral. No more priority for fiber. Many worry the new rules could favor satellite companies. But Mahesh wondered something else. What if neutrality isn't about picking winners, but about making room for entirely new technologies?
- [17:20]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
I think it's absolutely an opportunity. You need to be able to find the most cost efficient, environmentally least disruptive solution to get the job done. And I believe that Tara has a very significant role to play.
- [17:34]
Dina Temple Raston
For Mahesh, this was never about infrastructure, not really. It was about recreating a moment when connectivity first changed his life in a crowded Internet cafe, when the wider world suddenly became reachable. And it's about his father. Does he feel like you've done it?
- [17:56]
Mahesh Krishnaswamy
Well, he would never admit it, that I've done anything in my life. And that's always kept me in pursuit of trying to wanting to please him and keep doing more and more. I just have to know for myself that I'm headed in the right direction. And I also think that this is a. This is a long journey and I'm nowhere close to being dull. So in many senses, actually, right, that I haven't really fixed this problem. I haven't solved this completely. So that remains a dream and that remains the pursuit that I'm on.
- [18:27]
Dina Temple Raston
Fiber, satellites, lasers, different paths to the same connection. And if Mahesh is right. The next time the Internet reaches somewhere new, it might arrive on a beam of light. This is Click Here. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zachary, Zach Hirsch and Casey Georgie. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavedo and fact checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Livingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonger. I'm Dina Temple Raston, and thanks for listening.
- [20:00]
BBC Narrator
Support for this program comes from Recorded Future in In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future Know what matters?
- [20:13]
Recorded Future Announcer
Act first Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here, Then check out our sister publication, the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.