Are you tired of congestion caused by multiple wireless networks? Do your devices lose their connection constantly? The market offers several solutions, but specialists have been working for years on what could be a definitive replacement for traditional WiFi: LiFi, which is based on light. A student at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands managed to optimize LiFi so that it now uses infrared frequencies, and its first laboratory tests indicate a speed of 42.8 gigabits per second. Where do we sign…?
Personally, I don't have major congestion problems, but some friends and colleagues have seen their area turn into a WiFi nightmare, with multiple networks occupying the same channels, causing interference and affecting the performance of all devices. The main recommendation for such cases is to jump to 5 GHz and stay above that noise; however, there are better things on the way, and one of them is LiFi. The first demonstrations of this technology were very striking. All a user has to do to receive information via LiFi is place their device under a special LED light... and that is exactly its weak point: nobody wants to have the lights on all day to access the Internet or stream on a local network.
The latest news about LiFi brings us to Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, where student Joanne Oh (now PhD) and a team of researchers created a new variant of LiFi based on infrared light. Although we have used IR for decades to transmit information (your TV remote control is a good example), the difference here lies in a series of “light antennas” that transmit rays at different angles and wavelengths. Interference is reduced to zero because the antennas have the ability to assign a different wavelength to each device, and this is maintained even if there are WiFi networks nearby. The frequencies are about 200 Terahertz, with wavelengths greater than 1,500 nanometers.
Now, the best part: How fast is this LiFi? Over a distance of two and a half meters, Joanne Oh reached a peak of 42.8 gigabits per second, more than 100 times what an average router can deliver. The “asterisk” accompanying that measurement is that it only applies to downloads, while uploads are still carried out with conventional signals. How long will we have to wait to see something like this on shelves? About five years… at least.
