Is this expected to be a niche technology, or is it something that regular people will use? Seems like it would be a hassle to make sure that your li-fi receivers are within line of sight of your li-fi transmitters or whatever.
One in the ceiling of every room you want coverage in would be fine. Enterprise grade ones in stores.
More importantly, though, it is more secure and higher performing. Could see the government using this for wireless SIPR rooms. They won’t until the tech is tested and refined first though.
Let the hobby community do that part and the regular consumer will see something very usable in a few years.
I could imagine it being installed on ceilings within certain rooms. Devices could be connected to both lifi and wifi. If lifi isn’t working it could fall back to wifi. But in reality, I have a feeling this will just be in niche scenarios, yes. I can imagine wifi getting 100x faster before this catches on.
Also, need repeater to reach certain room in the corner? Just strategically place some mirrors and you’re golden!
I like how they quickly glance over the fact that you need line of sight to connect and call that a good thing because people behind a wall cant steal your data.
Within the same room, it is possible to use a frequency of light that will reflect off of almost anything. I just got a window AC unit with a remote that defies physics. Like I can have a desk, and closed plantation shutters (slats and doors) in front of the receiver on the front of the unit, point the remote anywhere in the wrong direction and still activate the thing. It’s just an IR LED transmitter setup. I’ve never seen one that is quite this powerful. It is uber cheapo general electric bottom of the consumer grade junk category too.
This is the NSA’s wet dream tech. Anyone with line of sight could intercept the data stream.
I have a remote for a TV that does the same thing. Can point any direction and it works.
For low datarates sure, but at high speeds the dispersion caused by light taking multiple paths will be unacceptable. The reason single node fiber is so thin is to make sure light can only travel along one path. If you want multi gigabit speeds, you will need a direct line of sight.
It absolutely is a good thing when security is concerned. WiFi is easy to snoop even if you’re not physically in the room, if you know what you’re doing. Sure there are encryption standards that are very good to tamp down on this. However, what’s even better with LiFi is you must be physically in the room to intercept any transmissions that are being sent.
This is by design one of the largest advantages to LiFi. There are other practical uses as well, but it’s not like LiFi is designed to explicitly replace WiFi.
This is cool and all, but Wi-Fi and Li-Fi are equally “light-based”, it’s just using different frequencies. A higher frequency means potentially faster data transmission, but at the cost of faster attenuation. We see this with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz wifi already, and this sounds to me like a more extreme version of that
Idk. Lifi uses actual light waves which are quite high up the spectrum. For sure Wi-Fi and Li-Fi are both electromagnetic waves, but light itself is a very small section of the EM spectrum. Above that wavelength you get ionizing radiation that gives you cancer and below that is harmless non-ionizing light and radio waves.
Yes and no. It’s both electromagnetic waves but the frequencies are very very far apart. So far, the techniques we use to emit and receive them are fundamentally different. Their propagation and transmission characteristics are also very different. Also, the data transmission rate (in theory) only depends on the bandwidth of the transmission channel, not the absolute frequency. But there’s more “room” for large bands at higher frequencies, of course.
I heard about this tech several years ago. Good to see progress being made
Radio waves are light too. The article says that they’re planning to use near infrared range for Lo-Fi. It will basically be mostly limited to short distances and line of sight. I also wonder how natural light in those frequencies from cooking, exhaust etc. would affect the signal.