LiFi, a data transmission technology that makes use of the visible light spectrum rather than radio waves, has been successfully tested in an office environment. The results show it is 100 times faster than WiFi.
Velmenni, a start-up based in India and Estonia, demonstrated a LiFi-enabled lightbulb in Estonia capital city Tallinn last week. The data transmission reached a speed of 1Gbps.
WiFi in South Africa has an average of 1.15Mbps download and 1.03Mbps upload speeds across all mobile and desktop devices.
Speaking to International Business Times UK, Velmenni CEO Deepak Solanki said the technology could reach consumers in three to four years. "We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where we can utilise the visible light connection (VLC) technology."
However, Solanki does not believe LiFi will completely replace the WiFi network, but rather complement it. "It is very difficult to create a whole new infrastructure for LiFi, so somehow we need to integrate our system with the current system."
In an interview with Indian entrepreneur Web site Your Story, last year, Deepak said: "We're the first Indian start-up/research lab that has built working demos of this technology. Basically, in LiFi technology, we blink the LED light with very high speed in a complex pattern. The receivers detect these complex blinking patterns, and decode the data."
Pros and cons
LifFi technology is limited because it does not move through walls. Each lightbulb in each room will have to be LiFi-enabled, whereas WiFi only requires one router in the home.
Although this limitation means it is very secure, neighbours will be unable to pick up a connection. LiFi also does not interfere with radio waves so can be used in environments like airplanes and hospitals.
However, direct sunlight interferes with LiFi signal, so it cannot be used outdoors.
The visible light spectrum is 10 000 times larger than the highly sought-after and government-regulated spectrum for radio waves. This means LiFi will work better than WiFi in highly congested public areas.
There are other companies working on similar technology, including PureLifi, LVX System, and Nakagawa Labs in Europe, the US and Japan.
Your Story reported Velmenni will make money through licensing the technology to bigger LED manufacturers, and create customised applications for problems using VLC.
The term LiFi was coined in 2011 by professor Harald Haas in a TED Talk.
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