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What is LiFi?
Light Fidelity or Li-Fi is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system running wireless communications travelling at very high speeds. Li-Fi uses common household LED (light emitting diodes) light bulbs to enable data transfer, boasting speeds of up to 224 gigabits per second. Li-Fi has the advantage of being useful in electromagnetic sensitive areas such as in aircraft cabins, hospitals and nuclear power plantswithout causing electromagnetic interference.Both Wi-Fi and Li-Fi transmit data over theelectromagnetic spectrum, but whereas Wi-Fi utilizes radio waves, Li-Fi uses visible light.
How it works? Li-Fi and Wi-Fi are quite similar as both transmit data electromagnetically. However, Wi-Fi uses radio waves while Li-Fi runs on visible light. Li-Fi is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system. This means that it accommodates a photo-detector to receive light signals and a signal processing element to convert the data into 'stream-able' content. An LED light bulb is a semi-conductor light source meaning that the constant current of electricity supplied to an LED light bulb can be dipped and dimmed, up and down at extremely high speeds, without being visible to the human eye. For example, data is fed into an LED light bulb (with signal processing technology), it then sends data (embedded in its beam) at rapid speeds to the photo-detector (photodiode). The tiny changes in the rapid dimming of LED bulbs are then converted by the 'receiver' into electrical signal.The signal is then converted back into a binary data stream that we would recognize as web, video and audio applications that run on internet enables devices. Due to its shorter range, Li-Fi is more secure than Wi-Fi and it's reported that embedded light beams reflected off a surface could still achieve 70 megabits per second. We are ready to bring a more secure and faster internet connection to you in a blink an eye.
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