Video Source: TED

Expect to hear a whole lot more about Li-Fi — a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication — in the coming months. With scientists achieving speeds of 224 gigabits per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier this year, the potential for this technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is huge.

And now, scientists have taken Li-Fi out of the lab for the first time, trialling it in offices and industrial environments in Tallinn, Estonia, reporting they can achieve data transmission at 1 GB per second — that’s 100 times faster than current average Wi-Fi speeds.

“We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where we can utilize the VLC technology,” Deepak Solanki, CEO of Estonian Tech Company, Velmenni, told IBTimes UK.

“Currently we have designed a smart lighting solution for an industrial environment where the data communication is done through light. We are also doing a pilot project with a private client where we are setting up a Li-Fi network to access the Internet in their office space.”

Li-Fi was invented by Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland back in 2011, when he demonstrated for the first time that by flickering the light from a single LED, he could transmit far more data than a cellular tower. Think back to that lab-based record of 224 gigabits per second — that’s 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every single second.

The technology uses VLC, a medium that uses visible light between 400 and 800 terahertz. It works basically like an incredibly advanced form of Morse code — just like switching a torch on and off according to a certain pattern can relay a secret message, flicking an LED on and off at extreme speeds can be used to write and transmit things in binary code.

The benefits of Li-Fi over Wi-Fi, other than potentially much faster speeds, is that because light cannot pass through walls, it makes it a whole lot more secure, and as Anthony Cuthbertson points out at IBTimes UK, this also means there’s less interference between devices.

Source: Science Alert