We have already seen about Li-Fi which is 100% faster than wifi.
This year at Mobile World Congress PureLi-Fi was demonstrated by Harald Burchardt, and got to see Li-Fi in action.
“The way that Li-Fi works is that we use LED lights and turn them into wireless transmitters,” Burchardt told Digital Trends. “Li-Fi, as you can tell by the name, is a service that’s akin to Wi-Fi, except that we use LED light, and specifically the lighting medium, to communicate data wirelessly.”
“The way that Li-Fi works is that we use LED lights and turn them into wireless transmitters.”
PureLi-Fi was founded in 2012 with the goal of commercializing the technology. The demo area it set up at MWC consisted of three Li-Fi access points. These were roughly brick-sized boxes attached to LED downlighters, covering an area of around 20 square meters. The boxes effectively turn the lights into wireless antennas.
To receive data from these lights you need a dongle that acts as a wireless modem of sorts, which is plugged into your laptop or tablet. The dongles were a bit smaller than a pack of cards and plug in via USB, which also provides the power. There’s a sensor that catches the light coming down and then an infrared component that sends a signal back up. The overhead lights also have a networking component, so it’s possible for multiple users to connect to a single light source, and to move from one light source to another without losing your connection.
The Li-Fi connection pops up in exactly the same way an available Wi-Fi network does. Burchardt connected his laptop to it and began to stream a YouTube video. It worked perfectly with no buffering in sight, even when he walked around between the lights.
The speed of that system is 40Mbps, both downloading from the light and uploading from the dongle. The light has a 60-degree field of view which provides a coverage area of 9 to 10 square meters. The maximum data rate reduces slightly if you move to the edges of the light, dropping to around 75 percent, but the light can bounce off objects and still deliver a signal, it’ll just be slower the further you are from the main beam.
Burchardt pointed out that you can’t fit more than one Wi-Fi access point into a similar sized area, and if you do, the information would bleed everywhere around. That highlights two key advantages of Li-Fi: you can transfer more data in a localized area, and it’s more secure.
The inventor of light-based ‘Li-Fi’ Internet has completed the first working prototype
“The more Li-Fi enabled lights you have in an area, the higher your total capacity is,” explained Burchardt. “Light also doesn’t penetrate through walls the same way Wi-Fi does, so it allows you to create networks with much higher security.”
Li-Fi can already send 10 to 50 times the amount of data that Wi-Fi can in a single area.
“In the same way that a cellular communication system allows you to roam over an entire city or an enterprise Wi-Fi network allows you to roam over a campus, a Li-Fi network allows you to roam through a room or through any lighting infrastructure, which is almost any indoor area,” Burchardt said to the press.
“This technology will be everywhere in 10 to 15 years, it will be incorporated into every light and every device,” asserted Burchardt. “PureLi-Fi’s challenge is to be the one to do it, and ideally to do it in a shorter time frame than that.”
Via: DT
