Wi-Fi
is something we take for granted these days, although it really hasn’t
been ubiquitous for very long, having only been ratified as a standard
in the late 90s. It’s convenient and these days fast enough for
downloading software, watching HD video and transferring files between
your NAS and computer.
There are some issues with it though. For one thing, Wi-Fi is not all
that fast compared with the transfer speed of wireless systems. The
latest and greatest Wi-Fi standard (802.11ac) will hit a theoretical 900
megabytes per second (about 7 gigabits per second), although in real
world scenarios that figure is closer to 2 gigabits per second or
approximately 256 megabytes per second. A real world test of Li-Fi on
the other hand reached 1 gigabyte (about 8 gigabits) per second. In the
lab they’ve managed 224 gigabits per second. An astounding 27 gigabytes
per second.
There’s simply no competition between Li-Fi and Wi-Fi in terms of speed.
After all, Li-Fi operates in the terahertz frequency range. Way beyond
what Wi-Fi can achieve.
So, what is this amazing wireless technology? Well, it’s light. Plain
old visible or near-visible light. Li-Fi uses LED lights flicked on and
off so quickly that the human eye can’t possible tell the difference.
Data streams can be piggybacked onto the lights that you use to
illuminate your office or home. You don’t even needs line of sight,
reflected light is enough for a respectable 70Mbps.
You may also wonder what happens if you want internet, but no bright
lights. It turns out that these LEDs can be dimmed to the point where
you can’t see the light, but data transmission is unaffected.
Now, to be fair, the Li-Fi you can actually buy right now isn’t any
faster than Wi-fi. This is a technology yet to reach its potential, but
there is one immediate issue that Li-Fi brings to the table which
computing professionals may find interesting: Visible light can’t
penetrate walls the way that Wi-Fi radio can. This makes it much easier
to secure a local network, since those not within the reach of the light
can’t access the systems. It would certainly help curb those Wi-Fi
poaching neighbours,
Li-Fi and Wi-Fi can live next to each other quite comfortable, but maybe
in the not too distant future we’ll see high-performance computers and
render farms connected not by miles of ethernet cabling, but by the glow
of a few lightbulbs.