li-fi | Prepys' Homepage

A new wireless technology has just been taken and tested out of the lab which has been reported to be able to transmit data as fast as 1GB per second — about a hundred times faster against our standards for today’s Wi-Fi speeds.

Li-Fi is able to send this much data by using VLC technology (visible light communication, not the media player software). It was invented in 2011 by Herald Haas after being able to send significant amounts of data from simply flickering a single LED compared to what a cellular tower could transmit. Back then, he was able to record a chart-topping 224 gigabits per second of data. For comparison, ScienceAlert puts it as downloading 18 movies of 1.5GB each every second.

“Currently we have designed a smart lighting solution for an industrial environment where the data communication is done through light. We are also doing a pilot project with a private client where we are setting up a Li-Fi network to access the Internet in their office space.”

And now this same principle was used in offices as an initial trial in real-life situations. Haas mentions that all that needs to be done is to place a microchip to every potential illumination device and this would give it dual functionalities — illumination and wireless data transfer.

LTE-WiFi-LiFi-House-Illustration

By rapidly flicking these specially-designed LEDs on and off, it could send specific messages in binary code that could then be retrieved and decoded by devices. Rest assured that these flickering of light is done at extreme speeds that make it invisible to the human eye.

lifi_environment

There are a lot more interesting things to learn from Li-Fi (like being more secure and efficient, for example) which you can read here.

If the tests continue to succeed, there’s a bright chance (pun intended) that we’ll be using LEDs not only to light up our homes but also to connect to the Internet.

{Via} {Source}

The post Li-Fi is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi in transmitting data appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines News & Tech Reviews.

Wireless Fidelity, aka Wi-Fi is so 2013, or at least that’s how the engineers behind Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) see the future wireless data transmission. Let’s delve a little deeper into this fairly new concept and see how it can revolutionize the way we connect to the internet.

harald haas

After working on his project for nearly 8 years, University of Edinburgh’s Professor Harald Haas showcased his idea publicly during a TED talk back in 2011.

His idea involves turning an ordinary LED light bulb in to a wireless broadband device by rigging it to radio microchip. This chip then controls how the LED light behaves; switching it on and off to produce signals similar to binary codes which is then deciphered by a receiver on the other end.

Professor Haas’ idea caught fire and led to a £4.7-million grant from Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to fund his project. He’s now collaborating with a group of talented individuals from various Universities including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, St Andrews and Strathclyde.

Within the span of a year, Haas and his team has already covered a lot of grounds since they began to work together under the Ultra Parallel Visible Light Communications (UP-VLC) project and has recently made the headlines when they reported that they were able to reach transmission speeds of up to 10 Gbit/s using only single micro-LED light bulb.

lifi

Apart from lightning fast speed, another feature of Li-Fi that Haas takes pride on is that it’s “potentially more secured than traditional Wi-Fi connection” because light doesn’t pass through walls. However, this strength can also be its biggest drawback as future users needs to always be within range of the Li-Fi device in order to establish wireless connection.

Li-Fi is still a work in progress, but I think that the team working on the project is headed in the right direction and it’s pretty exciting to see what they’ll come up with in the future.

{source }

The post Light Fidelity, the future of wireless connectivity appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.