Although Alexander Graham Bell is mostly remembered for the invention of the telephone, in 1880 he also created a totally revolutionary device for the time, the photophone.
Together with Charles Sumner Tainter, his assistant, With this invention he was able to transmit sound through rays of lighta solution so that the telephone does not end up plaguing all cities with cables.
However, more than a century would have to pass for the development of another technology that, for the most part, was based on the Bell and Tainter photophone, with the arrival of LiFi, which allows data to be sent at high speeds using visible light.
In 2003, a team of researchers from Japan published research on what would be the origin of this technology, managing to create a theoretical data transmission system using white LED lights, through simulations.
Years later, Harald Hass, professor specializing in communication technologies at the University of Cambridge, introduced the term LiFi –which takes its acronym in English from Light Fidelity–.
Hass has been one of the greatest promoters of this type of technology, with hundreds and hundreds of research articles, and perhaps his figure is already one of the most important, with a technology that does not belong only to supposed theorists.
LiFi and WiFi: are they compatible?
In the world of telecommunications, you will most likely encounter numerous acronyms and acronyms that are difficult to differentiate. In the case of LiFi, the most important thing is to understand that it is an evolution of Visible Light Communication (VLC).
LiFi, so to speak, is a vitaminized VLC system and allows bidirectional communication on the network, almost in the same way as WiFi, although with several limitations due to the form of the technology itself.
When using visible light, LiFi can crash into different objects in a housesuch as walls, doors or windows, while WiFi is capable of passing through any obstacle up to a range of approximately 30 meters in the home.
Now, WiFi uses radio frequency waves, so there are important challenges, such as network saturation, something that can occur in larger cities, even more so with the connected city model.
In addition to this, different frequencies have to be reserved on occasion, and there is a limit to the data speed, for example, with the standards you have decided to choose –2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, etc.–.
However, as a great advantage, LiFi is capable of reaching speeds that far exceed what WiFi achievessomething that has already been tested in universities, hospitals or cities as important as New York.
The New York Experiment
In order to understand how telecommunications can evolve, it must be taken into account that the arrival of new technologies does not have to banish the forgetfulness of others.
Today, on a mobile phone, they all coexist in peace – WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC – and each one is dedicated according to its possibilities; For its part, this could happen with LiFi, something that has already been proposed with different projects.
One of them backed by Nav Wireless Technologies, an Indian company that has deployed the first commercial LiFi network in the United States, specifically in its offices in New York.
On its own website, the company assures that «the future of LiFi will involve greater integration with next-generation networks, such as 6G», as well as specific use in various sectors of connected cities.
In this way, it is expected to be one of the main technologies in controlling traffic lights, for example, but also in ensuring that hospital machines can be smarter and more efficient.
In short, it seems that it is getting closer and closer that LiFi will be, along with WiFi, a technology widely used in environments with a lot of network saturation.