Li-Fi Turns Every Lightbulb Into an Ultra-Fast Wireless Network

Current wireless networks have a problem: The more popular they become, the slower they are. Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be 10 times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.

In dense urban areas, the range within which Wi-Fi signals are transmitted is increasingly crowded with noise — mostly, other Wi-Fi signals. What’s more, the physics of electromagnetic waves sets an upper limit to the bandwidth of traditional Wi-Fi. The short version: you can only transmit so much data at a given frequency. The lower the frequency of the wave, the less it can transmit. Read more...