posted October 21, 2013 #
Maybe this is old news to most of you but I'm just now encountering the concept of
Li-Fi, a data transmission process that uses special LED bulbs to broadcast your ones and zeros. Here's a much more eloquent intro to the concept taken from
this Quartz article.:
First, data are transmitted to an LED light bulb—it could be the one illuminating the room in which you’re sitting now. Then the lightbulb is flicked on and off very quickly, up to billions of times per second. That flicker is so fast that the human eye cannot perceive it. (For comparison, the average energy-saving compact fluorescent bulb already flickers between 10,000 and 40,000 times per second.) Then a receiver on a computer or mobile device—basically, a little camera that can see visible light—decodes that flickering into data. LED bulbs can be flicked on and off quickly enough to transmit data around ten times as fast the fastest Wi-Fi networks. (If they could be manipulated faster, the bandwidth would be even higher.)
Obviously there are limitations and hurdles to overcome (particularly line of sight) but having wireless data come from lightbulbs seems like a wise way to pursue the ubiquity of Internet.
