100x Faster Than Wi-Fi: Li-Fi, Light-Based Networking Standard Released

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.

That's a feature!

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.

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Apple Cloth will sell like hot cake

It's going to be great if you don't imagine it as a one-for-one replacement for traditional wifi and use it in applications that are specific to its strengths and weaknesses.

Also, just how dusty is your house that one week's accumulation is enough to snuff out a signal?

Yup, as someone who worked with radar, I'm not really sure what they're trying to say.

It is 5 years away from being 5 years away

I'm pretty sure I heard about this in high school, over 10 years ago...

Looked it up, and it was first announced in 2011.

time for a new round of funding - it's only 5 years away!

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.

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.

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.

At these frequencies, even paper could effect transmission speeds.

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.

As I understand, this is very low distance, basically for office settings. What ISPs will do to connect to/provide connectivity to a remote site is install point to point microwave radios. They are not impacted by weather too much, but they do lose signal strength if the radios are misaligned. There have been some funny situations where signals will be out of spec because protected birds like bald eagles are nesting on the radio and it is illegal to disturb their nests, or squirrels are storing acorns in them.

That is what service providers will do if they want to offer cellular connectivity to a small town where running fiber would cost millions of dollars. They will contract a service provider to provide CTBH (Cell Tower Backhaul) via point to point microwave radios. Multiple radios can be used for redundancy / to add bandwidth capabilities by bonding channels together, suddenly they can provide 4g/5g cellular connectivity without needing to spend millions of dollars in installing fiber.

Really depends on the size of the receiver. Its possible to use it at interplanetary distances if we are willing to build a mirror 10s of square miles in size. For point to point my guess would be a few miles. The horizon is the cutoff point for sure so one beam could never be more then the line of sight horizon at the altitude of the receiver for sure.