Breakthrough Is A Signal Wifi Could Be On The Way Out
News broke this week of an innovation that may revolutionise the future of networking in the home and office and send wifi to the technological graveyard.
Its possible replacement might come to be known as lifi, because it uses light in place of wireless signals to transmit data, just as fibre optic cables do. The result would be a phenomenal increase in speed.
The challenge is, of course, that using visible light would be a bit awkward, a dilemma research engineers have been nagging at that for some time.
The breakthrough has come at Eindhoven University of Technology, where a PhD student, Joanne Oh, has succeeded in transmitting data using infra-red light at 40 Gbytes/sec. Given that the fastest wifi today runs at just one Gbyte/sec, the industry is suddenly very excited about the massive potential of the leap in speed.
There are upsides and downsides of this new approach and its limitation is that infra-red, unlike wireless, cannot pass through walls. That could eliminate the interference issues that can badly degrade wifi signals when a device is in range of a host of different sources. It would mean, however, that each room would need its own infra-red source to transmit the signals.
Yet there could be more than one transmitter in any room. With different wavelengths of light, the signals would not interfere with each other at all.
So, the potential move to infra-red networking could open up tremendous opportunities for even higher quality entertainment streaming and gaming and the rapid exchange of information between devices. The challenge, then, would be for broadband links, or maybe their successors, to keep up.
