Meet Li-Fi, the potential successor to Wi-Fi.
Although it's already been in development for a few years, Li-Fi's getting more press since last week, when Estonian technology company Velmenni was able to use it to achieve speeds of 1 Gbps in real-world office and industrial environments, as opposed to inside a lab. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Oxford achieved speeds of 224 Gpbs. (That speed would allow you to download 18 feature-length films in a single second.)
PURE LIFI
German physicist Harald Haas, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, coined the term Li-Fi and first introduced the technology at the TED conference in Edinburgh back in 2011. (You can watch his talk below; it starts to get really interesting around the 5:40 mark.)
Haas went on to found pureLiFi, a company that has taken the lead in bringing this ground-breaking research to market. Haas serves as chief scientific officer, and he's been joined by a number of "visible light communication engineers." Their vision statement: "To be the world leader in Visible Light Communications technology enabling ubiquitous, high-speed, secure data networks wherever there is illumination."
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."
Future Is Going To Be Hi Fi With Li Fi