Light-based “LiFi” is amazingly fast, remarkably fragile – and now standardized – Ars Technica

It is almost certainly light The fastest thing out there. So it makes sense that “light-based wireless,” or LiFi, could theoretically blow the doors off existing wireless radio wave standards, commensurate with up to a maximum of 224 Gbps. [Edit, 2:40 p.m.: It does not make sense, and those doors would remain on each rhetorical vehicle. As pointed out by commenters, radio waves, in a vacuum, would reasonably be expected to travel at the same speed as light. Ars, but moreso the author personally, regrets the error. Original post continues.]

As long as there is nothing blocking the distance between the receiver and the lamp you made the LiFi access point. Or you don’t need to turn off the lamp completely to sleep. And you’re willing to add a dongle and keep it pointed in the right direction, at least for the time being.

But LiFi, or 802.11bb, isn’t really meant to replace Wi-Fi, but rather to supplement it — which is good for a technology that has been theoretically nullified by printer paper. in ad Standard certification from IEEE (Spotted on PC Gamer) And on the LiFiCO FAQ page, the LED-based wireless standard is being positioned as an alternative for certain use cases. LiFi can be useful when radio frequencies are blocked or blocked, when connection security is paramount, or just when you want to transmit the speed of light at the expense of line-of-sight alignment.

Frauenhofer HHI, one of the developers of the standards, suggests “classrooms, medical and industrial scenarios”. Operating in the optical spectrum, rather than the limited amount of licensed radio wavelengths, Dominique Scholz, Principal LiFi Developer at Frauenhofer, “ensures higher reliability, latency and lower oscillation.” It also reduces distortion and eavesdropping and enables “centimeter-accurate internal navigation.”

Now that I found published standardHow does LiFi exist as a real product that you can use? in a very limited way. If you like cutting-edge networking technology, you can get into LiFi for $2,200 with the LiFiMax Flex, a suite of “the most affordable LiFi products on the market today,” according to LiFiCo. For that price, you get an antenna, a ceiling-mounted access point, a dongle, and an RJ45 cable to hook up to your connection. If you have another $200 to spend, you can Add a LiFiMax taba tablet in a rugged case that doesn’t require a dongle for LiFi access (although, fortunately, it also has traditional Wi-Fi connectivity).

Oddly enough, these packets only count at 150mbps and 140mbps. PureLiFi, designing products for OEMs, promises just that Its light antenna is one It is “gigabit capable”, while the product brief describes it as “1Gbps+”. The product page says LiFi is “the path to breakneck speeds,” but where we’re at right now is no wider than the widest spots of traditional Wi-Fi.

There is potential here, despite the early awkwardness of Wi-Fi via flashlight. While you can’t completely turn off the LiFi spot, the signal has integrity when the room is 10 percent lit (60 lux), and the LiFiCo FAQ suggests future use of invisible parts of the light spectrum. LiFi also acts, crucially, as an actual source of light. The current fluctuations within the light, which transmits the binary data, occur at speeds too high for the human eye to perceive. In other words, LiFi shouldn’t occasionally remind you of the importance of “dimmable” bulbs.

And the required ultra-fast line-of-sight connection could make sense for emerging applications such as AR/VR/XR, peer-to-peer transmission in a secure setup, or simply offload the bandwidth-consuming process from taxable Wi-Fi. wifi network.

While newer Wi-Fi standards and copper lines can apparently handle most of our bandwidth needs, demand tends to increase in size to the size of its enclosure. LiFi could be that next container. As long as your cat doesn’t walk on it.