Fiat Lux

 New on ramp to Internet 100x faster than Wi-Fi and uses Light Waves

Some very smart engineers in Estonia are developing a new way to wirelessly access the Internet and making that connection about 100x faster than Wi-Fi.   Most of us are very familiar with Wi-Fi.  Many have a Wi-Fi router at home allowing the connection of several devices to the Internet.  Coffee shops, gas stations, fast food joints and even some city parks have Wi-Fi.  

A Wi-Fi router uses radio waves to connect with your iPad or other digital device.  Since the radio transceiver is low power, the signal is only usable over short distances and the speed of the connection is limited by the band width of the radio signal.

The new technology uses light waves instead of radio waves to establish the Internet connection.  At first reading I was confused that this was seen as a “new” technology.  In reality, we have been using light for decades to send data though glass fibers.  Today the lion’s share of Internet traffic passes through fiber optic networks that use light waves.  The light source is usually a high power laser.  A more careful reading of the reports cleared up my confusion.

This new technology, called Li-Fi, does not require a special laser light source, rather it can use lighting already present in the home, office or even a plane or boat.  It does require the light source to be LED based.  

So imagine a large office setting with hundreds of cubicles.  The Internet signal is sent to all the devices in the room using the same LED lighting fixtures that are used to illuminate the room.  Any device that has an unobstructed path to the light source can have access.   The light waves can provide much faster connections than Wi-Fi.  In fact, the engineers have been able to deliver data speeds of 1 gigabyte or more.  That is about 100x faster than most of us have at home.

Since the light waves cannot pass through walls, Li-Fi will not replace radio based Wi-Fi. Also it will not work outside in bright sunlight. But in certain applications it will be revolutionary.  For example, there is a concern that Wi-Fi based connections on an airplane could disrupt some of the flight systems.  Using the cabin lights for the passengers’ Internet connections would remove that concern.

The roll out of this technology is still a few years off.  It will take making devices able to use the light-based connections.  Today’s Wi-Fi connectivity is standard on most every digital device and soon Li-Fi enabled devices might well be as commonplace.