Brace for 1GBPS Internet Speed Via Light Bulbs; LiFi Offers 100 times Faster Internet Than WiFi
Imagine switching on a light bulb, and getting Internet access at a mind-blowing speed of 1 GB/second, which is 100 times faster than WiFi currently available.
This is not fiction anymore, as an Estonian startup founded by an Indian has successfully tested the concept in real world. And within next 3-4 years, we can experience it firsthand.
Data transfer at speed of light, is no more a fiction
Velmenni, founded by Deepak Solanki and Saurabh Garg, is based out of Estonia. During the recent Slush 100 startup competition in Helsinki, they successfully implemented the commercial aspect of Li-Fi to provide high speed Internet access.
Deepak, who is the CEO of Velmenni, said, “We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where we can utilize the VLC (visible light communication) technology.”
Basically, they are working on a platform using which data communication can happen within an organization using nothing but light. Switching on a LED can enable the user to transmit high speed data between two devices, seamlessly. Using Li-Wi network, this can be accomplished commercially.
There are some major researches going on in this direction. For instance, last year, we had reported about a French company called OledComm, which are creating a smartphone based on LiFi to transmit data at high speed.
Earlier this year, researchers at Oxford University successfully achieved bi-directional speeds of 224 gigabits per second (Gbps) using LiFi technology. Technically, this allowed them to download 18 movies of 1.5 GB each in a single second!
Much more research and testing is required to accomplish commercial usage of this new breakthrough. In fact, to kickstart the process, startups would be required to use existing hardware capabilities to prove this technology.
As Deepak shared, “It is very difficult to create a whole new infrastructure for Li-Fi so somehow we need integrate our system with the current system,”
Future of Internet: LED
Professor Harald Haas from University of Edinburgh, who is regarded as the inventor of Li-Fi, had earlier shared some interesting thoughts during a TED talk in 2011. As per him, “All we need to do is fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device and this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission,” Haas said. “In the future we will not only have 14 billion light bulbs, we may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener and even brighter future.”
The success of Velmenni and their unconventional plan to deploy light bulb based data communication network just proves that Professor Harald Haas’s prediction about LiFi is slowly, but gradually becoming a reality.
We will keep you updated as more details come in..
