{"id":14640,"date":"2013-10-31T20:02:36","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T14:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.entecity.com\/?p=14640"},"modified":"2013-10-31T20:02:36","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T14:32:36","slug":"chinese-lifi-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/chinese-lifi-network\/","title":{"rendered":"Li-Fi network breaks the 10GBps speed barrier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Chinese scientists disclosed a new technology to transmit Wi-Fi from a light bulb at up to 150Mbps. Now, British scientists have smashed that target by achieving 3.5GBps of data transfer speed.<\/p>\n

Called as the Ultra-Parallel Visible Light Communications Project – a joint team from several Scottish universities, Oxford, Cambridge and the Physical Sciences Research Council – has achieved 3.5GBps of the 3 primary colours from a small LED. Combined, effect makes a total of 10GBps of what is known as “LiFi”. Li-Fi or Visible Light Communications (VLC), replaces the conventional radio waves used by Wi-Fi with streams of light from LED bulbs. They used a special modulation technique called Orthogonal Frequency Divisional Multiplexing (OFDM) which involves millions of changes in light intensity translated into the zeros and ones of digital communication.<\/p>\n

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“If you think of a shower head separating water out into parallel streams, that’s how we can make light behave,” said professor Harald Haas, one of the project leaders. He has demonstrated the use of the technology to stream HD video to a computer.<\/p>\n

The bulbs turn on and off extremely rapidly to transmit the stream of ones and zeros that make up web data more efficiently than Wi-Fi radio waves can manage. The flickering happens so fast, that, they appear constantly lit to the human eye. Apart from high-speed data transfer, Li-Fi is very useful in situations where traditional Wi-Fi connections are banned, such as in hospitals or onboard aircraft.<\/p>\n

However, Li-Fi also comes with many drawbacks. Since light cannot penetrate solid surfaces and can\u2019t bend, the transmitter and receiver have to be in line of sight to establish a connection. In some circumstances, that drawback can be a huge blessing. For example, Li-Fi will help to prevent the hacking of home networks by so-called broadband \u2018piggy-backers\u2019 who uses your Wi-Fi for accessing the internet.<\/p>\n

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