Li-Fi — making Wi-Fi obsolete?

Li-FiIs this the newest and most smoking-hot trend for internet devices?

Quite possibly.

From Yahoo.com:

Internet by light promises to leave Wi-Fi eating dust

by Laurie Fillon

Barcelona (AFP) – Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp — that is the promise of Li-Fi, featuring Internet access 100 times faster than Wi-Fi with revolutionary wireless technology.

French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona. As soon as a smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video.

The big advantage of Li-Fi, short for “light fidelity”, is its lightning speed.

Are you ready for this?

Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps — fast enough to “download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second”, the founder and head of Oledcomm, Suat Topsu, told AFP.

“Li-Fi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than Wi-Fi” which uses radio waves to transmit data, he added.

The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs — which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second — to beam information through the air, leading it to be dubbed the “digital equivalent of Morse Code”

With television and a larger portion of bulk entertainment content going over the internet these days, now to include voice traffic (once held by landline telephones), tablets, smart phones — and soon to include the “internet of things,” bandwidth, production, venue and speed are about to become absolutely critical.

This new technology could be not just ground-breaking but, in a very short time, mandatory.

BZ

 

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8 thoughts on “Li-Fi — making Wi-Fi obsolete?

  1. from the article:
    “Li-fi has its drawbacks — it only works if a smartphone or other device is placed directly in the light and it cannot travel through walls.”

    this may someday find a niche to augment wi-fi, but i don’t see it as a replacement.

  2. The problem with all these technologies is the matter of backhaul, is there enough base load capability. I assume someday there will be, but right now we can’t move enough data fast enough to provide services to the end user.

    • Thanks Vince, for reading and taking the time to comment.

      Being a techno-Luddite, I’m not sure what backhaul is. Does that mean the “receiving” technology, the phones or tablets or TVs, don’t have the capability to handle the greater or faster load of information to them?

      BZ

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