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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."
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.
They're both part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Come on!
Yes it says "light" in the title and ScuttleMonkey-added text. The very first sentence of the actual user submission specifies "visible light". Once that context is established, "light" is a perfectly valid shorthand way to refer to it, and is often (though admittedly not always) used in that way.
The enemies of Democracy are
Astronomy