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Internet By Light Promises To Leave Wi-Fi Eating Dust (yahoo.com)
schwit1 writes: Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp - that is the promise of Li-Fi, short for 'light fidelity,' which features Internet access that is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the revolutionary wireless technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile fair, this week. As soon as this smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video. The big advantage of Li-Fi is theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps.
You need line of sight, it's nice for a few things but not much.
I'm pretty sure that the flickering also causes ass cancer. But, I don't have empirical proof just yet.
Coming up next: These "geniuses" invent a method to transmit data using sound, claiming it's a brand new thing that's never been done before, especially not with modems!
Oh, wait...
Sure. What would you use between the lamp and the rest of the world? Power-line ethernet?
Log in or piss off.
The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs -- which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second -- to beam information through the air, leading it to be dubbed the "digital equivalent of Morse Code"
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Is this supposed to be the first digital communication technology that operates by turning something on and off rapidly?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
They did say "revolutionary"... and when the revolution comes you will have line-of-sight... and like it!
not this again.
This is essentially what irda was. My old macbook (early 2000s) had it, and it was around well before then
http://lowendmac.com/2015/irtalk-irda-and-the-mac/
"The big advantage of Li-Fi is theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps.", unit it hits your ISP who will limit you to as slow as they can get away with, i.e. 0.1% of that bandwidth or less.
Theoretically great, practically useless.
So... no good in the middle of the night? Unless I want to wake my wife at 2am?
Would be happy to have Wi-Fi eating dust in my home as long as it poops outside!
love is just extroverted narcissism
...with a well placed umbrella.
Beware of the Leopard.
I doubt the requirement for Line Of Sight is convenient enough. You will definitely lose reception if you move outside of the room, or even the hotspot. Also, I fear that broadcasting light waves may be drain batteries faster than the 2.4GHz wireless standards. The article, that is not great, does not show many details from the handset point of view.
Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp
Wow, awesome!
And here I am connecting to a wireless router without having to stay in the same room like a chump.
Watching streaming movies in the dark cos I want to like a maroon.
Being connected without having to turn a lamp on when bright sunlight is flooding in through my windows like a dingus. ...you get the point.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You need line of sight
Yes, but don't think "antena" (like having a single light source in a room to which one would need to perfectly align a corresponding transmitter on the smartphone).
Think "lightbulbs". As in every single energy-saving LED light-bulb on the ceiling of the office openspace is a LiFi transmitter.
Most often, a phone is left in plain sight on the surface (on the desk, etc.) so its FOMO-owner can quickly glance at it to check for alerts/e-mail/tweets (I think I'm the only alien keeping my phone in a protective holsted on the belt instead of obsessively needing to check my phone like anyone else).
So most of the time a phone is exposed to light comming from the lighting system and thus could take advantage of high-speed LiFi down-stream.
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The LED and light bulb industry is facing a small problem : LED-based energy-saving bulbs are so durable and low energy, that one barely needs to replace them. As the older technologies (incandescant or CFL) are progressively replaced, the demand for LED bulbs will get lower and thus the market opportunities of LED bulb maker.
So that's why they need to find other incentive for people to buy newer one. Overload them with new features!
Hence why the recent surge of "connected bulbs" that can be turned on or off from an App, with App-controlled colour, with colour conected to the TV's ambilight feature, etc...
And thus, of course, with no surprise, TFA mentions that Philips (a non negligible LED bulb maker) is also showing interest about LiFi bulbs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Li-Fi has one advantage that it at least stands for something.
"The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs -- which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second"
Sweet, take THAT, 9600 baud modem!
"Apple may integrate it in its next smartphone, the iPhone7, due out at the end of the year, according to tech media."
Oooh, I'll take that bet...
How does it manage the uplink? Nothing about that in TFA, from what I can see.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Sme people are effected by fluorescent light's. What is this going to do to people with sensative eyes ?
I know if there is something funny going on with the power in the house as the compact fluorescent lights start to make my eyes ache.
Is this supposed to be the first digital communication technology that operates by turning something on and off rapidly?
Thing is, Joe Sixpack has absolutely no idea how optical fiber networking is working (and in fact calls "optical fiber" a Fibre-to-the-cabinet/-building with coaxial cable connection to the wall). Joe Sixpack hasn't even used an audio TOS-Link connector (HDMI is probably the first time he was unknowingly exposed to digital audio).
So yeah, Joe Sixpack has no idea how blinking lights can carry information, but Joe Sixpack has probably heard about "Morse code" from TV and/or from his dad.
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Cue in other clueless (and technophobic) people claiming to be "allergic" LiFi.
(Despite the fact that the typical carrier for networking at Mbps or Gbps speeds over light "blinks" at frequencies which are *several order of magnitude* faster than anything that can be detected by human eyes or other biological process.
In other words, the guy having tired eyes is more likely due to a 60Hz blink of a cheap LED with a flakky power block than the Mhz-Ghz blink of a LiFi bulb.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
TL;DR "Internet By Light Promises To Leave Wi-Fi Eating Dust" - so this new laser-based communication technology that impacts traditional Wifi by leaving charged motes in the ai?. ELI5 how these dust particles "eat" Wifi signals.
Bit of a bastard thing to do, but I guess everyone's investing in disruptive technologies nowadays.
A mad genius that seems to need more money. Hence, the word is out to help fuel the development of more things that we will never need. I read about this some time back. It's the kind of idea that you get when you just smoked some really good bud.
Getting the sun to be a transmitter then we could get awesome internet access during the day on a non-cloudy day?
Problem solved.
I've heard of this technology for years, and still not seen a sufficiently significant use case that would make it likely to succeed. I actually read TFA, and
Backers of Li-Fi say it would also be ideal in places where Wi-Fi is restricted to some areas such as schools and hospitals.
"Li-fi has a place in hospitals because it does not create interference with medical materials," said Joel Denimal, head of French lighting manufacturer Coolight.
This is the most convincing, although that's not saying much. Most modern medical equipment is not affected by wifi or cellular signals, but much like on planes, there is a healthy dose of overcautiousness about this. In the UK at least, there is the more cynical reason that banning cellular and wifi signals means patients have to pay the extortionate call charges incurred by using hospital's phone systems. But I'll give them this one, there might just be some milage there.
In supermarkets it could be used to give information about a product, or in museums about a painting, by using lamps placed nearby.
If this is the second best use case they can come up with, then they are pretty obviously doomed. Wifi and cellular work fine in shops and museums, and no actual advantage was stated for li-fi in this case.
It could also be useful on aircraft, in underground garages and any place where lack of Internet connection is an issue.
Wifi seems to work just fine on aircraft. It also works fine in underground garages, if you install access points there; where's the benefit of li-fi? Cellular is an issue underground, but li-fi doesn't replace cellular by itself, you'd need an uplink to connect to the internet, just like wifi.
Sorry, if that's all they've got, I'll happily bet my house and my car that this tech is going to fail.
So humans have built in light receptors (eyes) and basically have massively parallel slow processors running a firmware/software mix (brains), how long before someone hacks you through the desk lamp?
Or we could go the other way in the spectrum and also solve that nasty line of sight issue as well!
IR is longer wavelength and therefore lower bandwidth.
I doubt it. Until you get down into MUCH lower frequencies, the bandwidth is limited by the speed with which you can modulate (and detect the modulation of) the light rather than the frequency of the light itself.
Stop it. Just stop it.
Also, can we just agree to stop adding "gate" to the ends of the things bad people do?
No thanks, I'll just wait for Gi-fi so I can get reception even through some very thick walls.
The range on that mother will be far indeed. But just imagine that bandwidth!
Bandwidth so intense it'd boil your molecules!
Wow! Watching a video under a lamp will go great with my glossy touchscreen that reflects every fingerprint!
The notion of data-over-light for local area networking has come up every few years since I started reading Slashdot in the 90s.. Never seems to come to fruition though.
Since then Wifi has come and become ubiquitous. You can get a wifi router for 20 bucks and USB wifi nics for about 8. Its literally everywhere.
But if you want to talk about something useful you should see what I just rolled out. POE powered office lighting. Yeah. Crazy efficient LED lighting powered over 48volt POE. No electrician needed. Lighting automation is suprisingly easy when your lights literally have ipv6 addresses. Oh yeah. The fixtures are also wifi access points.
Now, I could see implementing network lighting with a different version of the above fixtures. Wifi works pretty great when properly deployed but in big cities there is some bad spectrum congestion. Could be useful in urban offices, particularly large office buildings. (And fuck me if you've ever run in to some jackass two floors up deciding that your network needs to be 'contained' with some shitty security appliance you'll see why wifi has some improvements to be made in shared scenarios)
Oh, so a 13 kiloton explosion goes off without any anthropogenic cause? I guess that disproves nuclear weapons!
1895: Lumiere brothers use a lamp to show a motion picture
2016: LiFi uses a lamp to show a motion picture
"Hey, look at my phone! It's playing this video through light networking!"
"Really? Let me see."
(turns phone around)
"Hey, it stopped playing."
:-/
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but unless this is line of sight then it's probably throwing light everywhere. I'm not sure my eyes would like that. I'm one of those unlucky bastards that could see monitor flicker below 85hz on the old CRTs and my brother is one of those unluckier bastards that gets headaches from florescent lights...
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Why the fuck can I not get a call?
Now all we need is broadband and storage devices to get near that level of transfer speed to make it even remotely useful.
.. to not have an exposed microwave in my house and work.
You are sensitive to 120 Hz (zero-crossing of the 60 Hz A.C. frequency)? That some pretty spectacular eyesight.
Or, is there some other "flicker" rate I've never seen with an LED bulb?
Something like this seems so obvious as correct.
Why not do it, OH other people fucked up so we can't have the lights flickering?
Damnit to hell, why are you people involved in the market? Why not just sell these awesome products to the market and not involve yourself in it if you can't take the light?
Cunts.
I didn't see any mention that, at least in the USA, using the visible light spectrum for any kind of communications is totally unregulated. No FCC certification or any other government twaddle to wade through.
It works fine, it's just that you have to wear sunglasses all the time.
Until people start going blind...
... You're blocking my Internet!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
LiFi will not be interesting to almost all home consumers. And, there is no compelling reason it needs to be, given that the average home internet speed is WAY too slow to care about that sort of data rate. Most folks are also not running home media servers either.
No. What LiFi is really intended for is office space.
There are a few new LiFi enabled industrial systems that can be powered by LAN cables. This means that the contractor need to only pull the LAN cable, which is far cheaper than running electrical lines. Not to mention, you don't even need a qualified electrician to do it.
So, once you have installed the LiFi lights over the work stations, you have light AND very high speed data. Better still is the built in security.
At my company, we do have wireless, but it is fire-walled to our internal servers since we have a reasonable chance for industrial snooping. With LiFi we could have wireless within the confines of our office area and team meeting rooms with zero leakage and no chance for people in the next room to latch on to the signal.
Then, when it's quitting time, turn off the lights and no more connection.
WiFi has no problem working through dust.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"As soon as this smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video."
So it's not meant for civil servants, if it starts playing a video unasked, you'll wake up your colleagues in the other cubicles.
...as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, as if lots of epileptics collapsed on the floor in fits.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
For one thing, it would only be one-way: from the light bulbs to your device. There's no easy to go the other direction.
Which is the direction that consumes most data and which is what ISPs have been doing for quite some time with DSL.
(Fast download, for consumers. Slow upload, to avoid people running servers so the consumer DSL doesn't compete with their business links)
But aside from that, it's just plain impossible: for your light bulbs to transmit LiFi, they would need a high-speed data connection to them, presumably gigabit Ethernet. {...} The cost of the hardware alone is going to be high (24- and 48-port switches aren't cheap, though I guess you could make cheaper versions since they really only need to be transmit-only and don't need to actually switch data between all the bulbs, just distribute it), but the installation cost would be astronomical on any existing building.
Let me introduce you to this funny technology called POF - Plastic Optical Fiber.
There's been quite a lot of development recently in plastics, and new generations of material that can sustain upto gigabit or multi-gigabits speeds over quite some distance (enough for a building).
Due to the typical core diameter of such fibers, termination is dead-fucking simple. You don't need extra-precisely connector (unlike the glass media that you need across a city). Just cut the fiber with a razor blade and plug it straight into a connector that looks like the one behind your speakers. Indeed, networking with POF is even simpler than crumpling Cat5/6 ethernet, it's as simple as connecting speakers.
Have a look at what some swiss startups are selling.
Price of the Light transmitter is falling too.
It's starting to definitely become an interesting way to "wire" high speed internet at a not too high cost.
A WiFi router, OTOH, is dirt cheap and only needs to be installed one place, and will generally give you coverage all over your house.
But its bandwith will be shared across all device connected to it.
A large openspace could really benefit from this kind of high-speed data distribution.
- big data volume (streaming data *to* the smart phone) could be better targetted or at least has a big enough bandwitdh so sharing would be less problematic
- small data volume (upstream from the smart phone) only would need to share radio bandwidth.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
He's joking to use microwave as that propagates through walls and other materials. Fun fact: Wi-Fi uses microwaves.
XOXO, Brick Tamland.
Also the name for the falsehood ratio of political speeches.
I work in an office with over 30 Wi-Fi routers.
That might explains why I can bring uncooked meals in the morning and they're ready to eat by noon.
Is that from the invisible light or the pr0n addiction? Hard to tell.
So we have news stories featuring all the ways of intercepting visible light from people's monitors to spy on them from a distance (or pick up audio emissions from the computer circuitry, etc.), and now we're proposing sending information through home lighting, which radiates out of every window???
Lasers
HP used to offer infrared links for their laptops, printers, and personal organizers. It worked fine, needed line of sight, of course. It was meant to be used the same sort of way Bluetooth is used today, for avoiding cables. You could, say, bring your laptop close to the printer, and it would connect and print. Actually, it probably makes sense to avoid the visible spectrum because of interference.
If you get another 10-20 routers, the food will be ready at 11.
Guaranteeing a return path from some transmitter on a PC or mobile phone is going to be real tough.
You cannot put a dozen transmitters in mobile devices to guarantee clear line of sight---the cost will skyrocket, there will be some impact on battery life, and there is not much free space in most mobile devices to begin with.
This could be useful as a broadcast technology though. With the line-of-sight requirement, it should be very easy to limit your range and avoid interference with anything outside of your property.
I like this a lot for local broadcast. I see no viable way to deploy it as a Wi-fi replacement.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
is white noise.
You mean the technology that has already existed for years in my tv remote?...
194 comments so far, and not a single person has thought to mention what a bright idea this is!
You're slipping /., you're slipping.
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