Light-based Li-fi internet 100 times faster than wi-fi home connection
26 Nov 2015
Wi-Fi could soon be replaced by Li-Fi. LiFi, which uses light to transmit data is 100 times faster than today's average wireless home connection.
According to Estonian tech company Velminni, which has installed Li-Fi in its offices, the technology had achieved speeds of up to 224 gigabits per second in the lab and 1 gigabit per second in real life. An office or industrial park could be lighted up with smart LED bulbs to provide illumination and transmit data at the same time.
The Li-Fi technology used by Velmenni can transmit data at up to 1GBps – over 100-times faster than current Wi-Fi technologies. It would take only a few seconds, at the speed, to download a high-definition film.
"We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where we can utilise the VLC (visible light communication) technology," Deepak Solanki, CEO of 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 makes use of LED bulbs that switch on and off billions of times per second to transmit strings of data. The process could be likened to a Morse code operator tapping out a message, with the process speeded up by several orders of magnitude.
Though the communication happens in the visible spectrum, meaning humans can see the light being emitted, the flickering happens much too fast for our eyes to notice it. In other words, to humans, a Li-Fi light bulb appears like any other, but simultaneously transmits lightning-fast internet.
The technology was invented by Harald Haas, a professor at Edinburgh University. In 2011 he used LEDs to send data at hundreds of times the speed of today's wi-fi networks.
Transmitting data using light is not new – in 1880, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, transmitted audio using visible light.
What is new about the technology is the use of specialised LED driver chips, which can dim and brighten LEDs to encode data.
The entire process happens at such blazing fast speeds that it is not beyond the perception capacity of the human eye.