LED light used to deliver wireless data?

This new technology has already a name: ‘’Li-Fi’’. It’s Harald Haas, a professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, who gives this name for Light-Fidelity. Haas pitched his proposal for Li-Fi data transmission, suggesting that the applications and capacity for data would be limitless. Because we will used it from car headlights to transmit data, or employing line of sight light sources as data transmitters.

Today, light fixtures are everywhere. And each one is capable of serving as a fate transmission device. One IT visionary says we could make data accessible anywhere in the world — with no additional cost for infrastructure. Turn existing light fixtures from street lamps to Smartphone LED screens into rapidly pulsating data transmitters.

This technology can works thanks to the D-Light System which uses a mathematical trick called OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), which allows it to vary the intensity of the LED’s output at a very fast rate. For us, this is invisible to the human eye; the bulb would simply be on and providing light. The signal can be picked up by simple receivers.

As of now, Haas is reporting data rates of up to 10 MBit/s per second (faster than a typical broadband connection), and 100 MBit/s by the end of this year and possibly up to 1 GB in the future.