Expect to hear a whole lot more about Li-Fi - a wireless technology
that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication (VLC) -
in the coming months. With scientists achieving speeds of 224 gigabits
per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier this year, the potential for this technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is huge.
And now, scientists have taken Li-Fi out of the lab for the first
time, trialling it in offices and industrial environments in Tallinn,
Estonia, reporting that they can achieve data transmission at 1 GB per
second - that's 100 times faster than current average Wi-Fi speeds.
"We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where
we can utilise the VLC (visible light communication) technology," Deepak
Solanki, CEO of Estonian tech company, Velmenni, told IBTimes UK.
"Currently we have designed a smart lighting solution for an
industrial environment where the data communication is done through
light. We are also doing a pilot project with a private client where we
are setting up a Li-Fi network to access the Internet in their office
space.”
Li-Fi was invented by Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland back in 2011, when he demonstrated for the first time that by flickering the light from a single LED, he could transmit far more data than a cellular tower. Think back to that lab-based record of 224 gigabits per second - that's 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every single second.
The technology uses Visible Light Communication (VLC), a medium
that uses visible light between 400 and 800 terahertz (THz). It works
basically like an incredibly advanced form of Morse code - just like
switching a torch on and off according to a certain pattern can relay a
secret message, flicking an LED on and off at extreme speeds can be used
to write and transmit things in binary code.
And while you might be worried about how all that flickering in
an office environment would drive you crazy, don’t worry - we’re talking
LEDs that can be switched on and off at speeds imperceptible to the
naked eye.
The benefits of Li-Fi over Wi-Fi, other than potentially much
faster speeds, is that because light cannot pass through walls, it makes
it a whole lot more secure, and as Anthony Cuthbertson points out at IBTimes UK, this also means there's less interference between devices.
While Cuthbertson says Li-Fi will probably not completely replace
Wi-Fi in the coming decades, the two technologies could be used
together to achieve more efficient and secure networks.
Our homes, offices, and industry buildings have already been
fitted with infrastructure to provide Wi-Fi, and ripping all of this out
to replace it with Li-Fi technology isn’t particularly feasible, so the
idea is to retrofit the devices we have right now to work with Li-Fi
technology.
Research teams around the world are working on just that. Li-Fi experts reported for the The Conversation last month
that Haas and his team have launched PureLiFi, a company that offers a
plug-and-play application for secure wireless Internet access with a
capacity of 11.5 MB per second, which is comparable to first generation
Wi-Fi. And French tech company Oledcomm is in the process of installing
its own Li-Fi technology in local hospitals.
If applications like these and the Velmenni trial in Estonia
prove successful, we could achieve the dream outlined by Haas in his 2011 TED talk below - everyone gaining access to the Internet via LED light bulbs in their home.
"All we need to do is fit a small microchip to every potential
illumination device and this would then combine two basic
functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission," Haas said.
"In the future we will not only have 14 billion light bulbs, we may
have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener, and
even brighter future."
