Can LiFi Technology Really Offer 100 Times Faster Speed Than WiFi ?

A new technology, known as LiFi, could one day offer internet speeds one hundred times faster than the WiFi we use today. Scientists have achieved speeds in the lab of up to 224 GB per second. 

That's the equivalent of downloading 18 movies in the blink of an eye. LiFi, or light fidelity, is now moving to trials in the real world, with office tests in Tallin, Estonia achieving speeds of 1 GB per second, 100 times the speed of traditional WiFi. 

The world's ever-growing desire for more data at faster rates is pushing WiFi's capacity to its limits. WiFi is achieved by transmitting data through radio waves, but can only transfer so much at a time. By 2019, it is estimated that the world will be exchanging roughly 35 quintillion bytes of information each month. Because radio frequencies are already in use and heavily regulated, that data is going to struggle to find a spot in line. WiFi is simply running out of space. 

Capacity is only part of the problem. WiFi is not a terribly efficient solution. The base stations responsible for transmitting radio waves only function at about 5 per cent efficiency, most of the energy being used to cool the stations. For those transmitting sensitive data, security is also a problem, as radio waves travel through solid objects such as walls and doors. 

Like radio waves, visible light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The difference is that viable light has a spectrum 10,000 times larger than radio waves. This means LiFi has the potential for enormous capacity. Instead of transmitting information via one data stream, visible light would make it possible to transmit the same information using thousands of data streams simultaneously. 

LiFi works by flashing LED lights on and off at incredibly fast speeds, sending data to a receiver in binary code. It's essentially an ultra-fast version of turning your flashlight on and off to create morse code. The flashes occur so fast that they are not seen by the naked eye. 

All one 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. In In other words, the infrastructure is already there. We can use the LED bulbs we already have, with some tweaking. 

Agencies