Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Internet Access Uses Visible Light, Not Radio Waves
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a company has demonstrated a new form of wireless communication that uses light instead of radio waves. "Its inventor, St. Cloud resident John Pederson, says visible-light embedded wireless data communication is the next step in the evolution of wireless communications, one that will expand the possibilities in phone and computer use. The connection provides Web access with almost no wiring, better security and with speeds more than eight times faster than cable."
im in ur bawx stealin ur photons
Radio waves are part of the light spectrum?
... are light, you insensitive clod!
I sense much beer in you. Beer leads to intoxication, intoxication leads to hangover. Hangover leads to sobering.
Looking at the access point can cause severe retinal burns. We are not responsible for retinal damage or permanent blindness as a result of using our product. Thank you, and have a nice day.
WARNING!
Do not look at the internet with your remaining eye.
liqbase
Light does not work so well when it's being blocked.
Light does not do well when in the presence of brighter light.
Light DOES provide better security NOW. But that's just a matter of time.
It just does not sound practical.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
Radio is just another color of light--a very, uh, extremely red color.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
oh, dang, someone stuck their hand in the laser bea-
It's called free space optics. The technology has been around a long time, in fact, and for a while it was fairly common on laptops. It was called IrDA, and though it was fairly short range you could use it to transfer files, establish a TCP/IP connection, etc.
I remember playing a Starcraft game with an iMac G3 and PowerBook G3. A friend and I used AppleTalk over IrDA. Unfortunately it was rather awkward since they had to line up, but we figured out you could bounce the infrared beam with mirrors. So we didn't need ethernet, we could play wirelessly...this was in 1998, long before 802.11b became mass-market.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Means little, when the current cable speeds can basically be infinite. You know how you have all those TV channels traveling through the same wire? They can do the same with the internet communications as well-- just use multiple channels in parallel.
8-channel cable DOCSIS spec
Or maybe they aren't talking about cable-internet specifically; I only skimmed TA :)
For how many decades does my university use laser links to our dorms? For how many decades do we have infra red data transmission, e.g. in remote controls?
Last time I checked light doesn't travel through my wall. Radio waves do.
Has this guy never seen snow? Or fog? Or rain? Does he live in a desert? Two words: Atmospheric absorption.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
to hearing lights out!!!
I don't think this technology is going to work too well for Jason, Grant, and the rest of the Ghost Hunters.
! I like radio-waves. With this I can't be under my sheet with a flashlight and read a scary book on my laptop.
What exactly would be the advantage? It seems like it would be so very susceptible to interference or disruption that it wouldn't be useful over any distance. Straight-line only, likely, as well, and so not very useful even from component to component of a computer on a desk. sure, fine, it might make a good portable-to-portable connection, but it won't replace the longer wavelengths whatever the bandwidth advantage because so much is opaque to visible light.
Tinfoil glasses :)
- The Sigless Wonder
From TFA:
So the cell phones equipped with that would NOT operate with any cell tower that was out of visual range. Doesn't that kind of limit your conversations with your bank to, essentially, being inside the bank building?
No. Because the fiber cable can be punched through walls and such. It does not require line of sight to work. But it works at the speed of light. Which is why it is preferred.
Doesn't some quantum cryptographic and military stuff use wireless light for data transfer already?
--- Thousands are enslaved every day.
Didn't we already go through this idea a couple times? Even to the point of HP(?) having incredibly ridiculous multi-emitter bulbs for computer lab installs and things?
--- Do you believe in the day?
So what's the frequency, Kenneth?
We had this back in 1994. It was called "IR modems".
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
There's a reason we don't already use visible light signals to send wireless data (except if we're lost in the wilderness, I guess). It's VISIBLE. Can you image how annoying it would be to have light flickering around you all the time from your communicating devices? One of the primary advantages of the various bands we use (radio, infrared, etc.) is that they don't interfere with our normal operations: they're invisible.
We've got plenty of bandwidth that doesn't interact directly with the human body. Why don't we stick to that instead of trying to use something that does?
ceci n'est pas une
OMG, that is unbelievable! Thank you.
Currently hooked on AMP
These guys claims are simply fraudulent. This technology has been around for decades.
Ever seen one of those new fangled "remote control" things that terrorvisions have ?
The open source version is at http://ronja.twibright.com/ and I bet there is more than a striking similarity to the equipment in TFA.
...what are you doing on slashdot on Friday at 5:30?
no wait, I'd rather ask why it's only 8 times as fast as cable...which cable? I have a 1gb cable in front of me right now.
Besides that, I predict this isn't going to revolutionize anything. It might work in specialized situations, but it's not going to replace cables in walls. Ever.
Das internetzwerken ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und
mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk,
blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht
fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken
sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets
muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
http://ronja.twibright.com/
Didn't IBM have an infrared system that would link a workgroup? It's been many years, but I vaguely remember something like this.
And why isn't this guy using IR???????
The IEEE 802.11 specification has defines an IR PHY as an alternative to RF. I've never seen it implemented though...
What happens when it rains?
Andy Tanenbaum has a nice story about that. On a conference they wanted to use a modulated laser to beam an internet connection to another building. Except they calibrated the target at night, it tested fine. But during the day the air would warm and break the connection. He found it rather odd they didn't just use a cable the next day, but the management insisted on using the broken technology. Didn't work they entire conference.
It's been investigated but the technology just won't work out. Light sensors have a strong speed/intensity tradeoff. Even with a several-inch wide lens you can't collect enough light to drive a sensor at more than a few kilobits/sec. And people hate to keep pointing the sensor at the opposite party.
And if the room has LED or CCFL lighting the interference from those is mighty intense.
This isn`t exactly new technology.
1
2
3
read some interesting stuff at mightyinteresting.com
Yeah, that's great and all, but every practical application I can think of for wireless connectivity has a high potential for temporary or permanent interruption of line of site access from the device to any possible access point.
Now not only can an annoying coworker come lean over the cube partition to tell me a boring story, they can cut off my ability to ignore them by surfing the web. Thanks, new pointless technology!
Yes, quantum encryption! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
To paraphrase Sun....The Network is the Smoke Detector.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Get out of my head!
This will never get approval for obvious reasons. The spectrum is so large. Why on Earth would you try to use the extremely narrow band used by our vision?
Let's not rain on this guy's parade and mention the infrared implementation of wifi. IrDA, RONJA and other essentially point-to-point technologies have been aroud for a while too. So, apart from the usual gushing, what makes this really different from what was there already, except maybe not very well known?
Correction: ..."
"An marketing drone writes to tell us that his company has demonstrated a
There, fixed for ya ;)
I hear that cloud computing is as fast as lightning. On Cloudnet, hops are HOT!
My foot, people were doing this decades ago in the analog world.
If you include fiber.. its digital too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I recall hearing about Ronja on /. years ago, and they have deployed it for a wireless net.
Great, every geek's house will have mirrored ceilings now.
Hey, turn off your damn flashlight, your f**king up my internet!...Yes, the strobe light too. Turn it off.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
From TFA:
Quite apart from the fact the country isn't explicitly mentioned in TFA (I assume it's the USA), why would someone say this? Not good for humanity, or for the communications or IT industries, but good for a specific country? Strange.
Photons be free!
You can't take the sky from me.
Modulating laser light to transmit information, I mean...
http://www.earthsignals.com/Collins/0036/index.htm
How will he get past the Semaphore patent though?
Actually, I wrote the address wrong on that patent in grade school... *SIGH*
1.) There is TCP/IP over Infrared (IrDA) and comes standard on Windows and works also in Linux.
http://web.pdx.edu/~mendyke/ip7780.html
2.) there are many laser link systems out there.
I even worked on one.
http://www.dnull.com/zebraresearch/company-mail.html
3.) The 802.11 standard also includes the 802.11 Infrared (IR) Physical Layer. 802.11 IR defines 1Mbps and 2Mbps operation by bouncing light off ceilings and walls to provide connectivity within a room or small office. This infrared version of the standard has been available since the initial release of the 802.11 standard in 1997.
4.) Spectrix Corporation of Mundelein, Illinois had a proprietary solution for this. I think they are out of business now.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QZrrXcs1R9gC&pg=RA1-PA207&lpg=RA1-PA207&dq=%22Spectrix+Corporation+%22&source=bl&ots=kMxMofcTd7&sig=qd4QvwoREWQloJKwnpmp63j-Z-I&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result
If you explore the link above from the book "Wireless Computing" By Ira Brodsky Published by John Wiley and Sons, 1997. This book goes in a lot of detail about many IP over optical solutions available at that time.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Reading along here, I came to wonder what would happen if someone block the light source such that it is no longer visible? Would the signal then be completely lost? My previous experiences with light is that they struggle to travel through walls... Wouldn't this limit the utility value and application areas of such a system?
The article is utter bullshit.
Using light, as opposed to radio waves is NOT more secure, unless the room has no windows, or others areas for light to escape.
Wiring a room to support it could easily cost $300 (you still need atleast one network drop to the room, and mount the transmitter).
Are there environments where the slight advantages it has may be worth it? sure. but they will be so rare that the cost of the device will stay quite high.
THe article looks like a puff piece designed to lure in investors.
Why have super-fast internet based on a technology that be blocked with a carelessly placed piece of paper? Mobile phones that go out of range when you walk around a corner? Classroom networks with nodes that have to renegotiate a connection whenever the teacher walks past and blocks the light source?
While it is an interesting technology, IMHO it will only have limited application. High security buildings is one is one possibility. The inherent properties of visible or near visible light ie. it doesn't go around corners or through solid objects, make the technology pretty useless for most people.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Information Leakage from Optical Emanations specifically addresses devices that accidentally leak information, but the same principles will apply to information that is deliberately transmitted (in the visible spectrum, or otherwise).
It might not be as easy as eavesdropping on your neighbor's wifi, but the bottom line is that the physical transmission of information in both cases (wifi and visible/optical) is observable from a distance, and therefore both mediums face the same problems in terms of security.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore
No, I didn't read TFA!
this is a dupe, but I can't dig up the link now..
I hate stories like this. It suggests that "light" is somehow different than "radio waves". They're the same thing, the difference is that we can see in that portion of the spectrum.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I wish people like you would shut up and go take an introductory-level physics course.
The graveyard of free space optics companies isn't big enough already?
Terabeam - RIP
AirFiber - RIP
Omnilux/ClearMesh - RIP
Optical Access - RIP (OK, MRV is still around)
fSONA - technically still alive
Lightpointe - appears to be undead now
"Because light does not travel through walls, cell phones and government and banking information would be more secure."
It's not a bug, it's a feature, really - it is, please believe me.
1996 called. It wants its HP NetBeamIR Infrared Ethernet Access Point back.
IR access points have been around for years, and they work OK. They can even be made to work through diffuse reflections, so you don't have to have a clear line of sight. But you need a lot of access points to cover a space.
There's a bigger team at Boston University that's been working on this technology.
I particularly like their plans for use in cars. I can imagine combining this with nano piezoelectric technology to create roadways that use passing car vibrations to power illuminated markings that can also transmit road condition information to passing cars or link their light-based inter-car networks around corners and over hills.
The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades that decode and display ambient porn...
But won't this require prefect line-of-sight to have any hope of working?
I'm imagining something like a TV remote, or those IRda systems PDAs and printers used to have but, since it's in the visible band of the spectrum, with more line-of-sight problems. I don't see anything like that replacing 2.4GHz wireless any time soon.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Bah! I did the same thing years ago using a strobe light and lava lamp. Got data transfer rates upwards of 20bps until it gave me an epileptic seizure.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
I need to iron my semaphore flags.
Light means line of sight. Now I can't surf cloaked under my warm covers, without a cable that is.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
Optical networking in free space for data transfer is nothing new. A company called fSONA offers fiber-like connectivity up to 7km and 2.5Gbps. Looks like they target military, federal service providers and enterprise customers. "point-to-point laser signal is extremely difficult to intercept, and therefore secure" -- http://www.fsona.com/solutions.php
Quit putting hand puppet shadows on my Internet!
see: http://www.lightpointe.com/home.cfm
What advantage does this have over using regular IR? Does visible light carry more bits/symbols than just using infrared due to it being higher frequency? The article has next to no technical details about this whatsoever,
Light is part of the RF spectrum... just a particular part that the human eye can see. So is heat. We don't use these sections because they're very annoying to humans to have fluctuating seemingly randomly for transfer of data.
Is this going to be like trying to use my TV remote with other people in the room? "MOVE, you're blocking my line of sight to the internets!"
Correction: ..."
;)
"An marketing drone writes to tell us that his company has demonstrated a
There, fixed for ya
Correction: ..."
;)
"A marketing drone writes to tell us that his company has demonstrated a
There, fixed for ya
In the first trial network installation in Birmingham, Alabama, 665 small Japanese children fell to the floor in convulsions.
Wireless visible light communication is neither new (IRDA, remote controls, diverse schemes to link building with lasers, all in use right now), nor is it favorable from the usability viewpoint to replace WLAN by light transmissions. (yes, i admit the the high-speed MIMO, multispectral, link between my computer on my eye is great. Its capacity of a few Gbit/Second are amazing.
Almost a decade ago, I recall folks being able to reconstruct data transfer a modem by simply watching the activity LED, as it blipped for every bit.
It may have been an ethernet hub/switch, I don't recall. But this is, in the most simple form, just an extension of that work.
And hey... your WAP can double as your room light!
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Im sure its at the speed of light !!! :)
But its bandwidth capacity is not 1 bit per wavelength.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
LOS is FAR FAR FAR better than mostly non-LOS of current wireless! Crap pay me infinitez amountz of moniez for redundant applicationz of technologiez!
They are called lasers and I know of a 100mbps link that has been up for many years now connecting two building roughly 1/2 mile apart. They have to be aimed, but this is old news.
I can SEE the internets!
... and then they built the supercollider.
Yup, mod 'em up boys. Mod 'em up.
i remember reading about this several years ago in a magazine in a doctors office...
If history repeats itself, why can't we study the future?
I'm probably not the first person to crack the submitter with a clue-by-4... that visible light is electromagnetic radiation, just like radio waves... and always has been. So its just the same thing but at a higher frequency.
Next thing you'll know they'll use old modems to communicate over the air by sound.
By the way, has anyone ever done this? I tried to look on Google but couldn't find any such thing.
You just got troll'd!
Suddenly not travelling through walls is a "feature". I can see the advertising now.... "fibre optic speeds.... except on rainy days"
Welcome to 10 years ago: http://ronja.twibright.com/
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Datapoint did this around 1985.
Note that this St. Cloud is in Minnesota and not Florida. That makes a big difference, especially this time of year.
We are the 198 proof..
http://ronja.twibright.com/
They started that project in 1998.
Please note that using LEDs for this is obviously a dead-end solution when it comes to bandwidth. The light is not monocromatic enought to be suitable for high bandwidth solutions (>1 GBit/sec)
Mr. Alex G. Bell developed the "photophone" to wirelessly transmit telephone messages by visible light over a decade before Tesla and Marconi did anything with radio.
Everyone knows radio waves have a lower frequency of calories than microwaves.
This is why microwaved food makes you fat.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Let's see... you know someone has this device, they think they are "secure." you place _PASSIVE_ device consisting of collector and memory enough to save say a day's worth of data in something like a clock if you have daily access to persons room (think janitor) or something they will throw out in a few days (think flowers) and you have all the blinks and flashes. Then you can take the collected data back to your bunker and run probably a simple XOR or something equally as trivial on it and there you have it... all the communications of the day, week, month. I think this need to be filed under the other /. article on "technologies that will fail in 2009"
I used to work for one of these guys years ago... it doesn't surprise me to see him behind another insecure and worthless "filler" technology. Hey Mike... read this: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=5644
The real rear end chapper is that there is TONS of really cool technologies and lots of smart people in Minnesota. Sorry /. that you get the "country bumpkin tech"
p.s. My Apple Newton had this same technology.
Neat technology indeed. Although it's not at all new. The story broke in early October, and yet it's been surprisingly low-profile across the tech blogs. And less buzz means less VC capital for developing the technology further. Sad, since it's beyond promising.