LiFi - Time for cleaner, greener and brighter Internet

LiFi is high-speed, bidirectional, fully networked and mobile wireless communications using light (as opposed to traditional radio frequencies). It was coined by Prof. Harald Haas and is recognized by the IEEE standardization committee for Optical Wireless Communications.

Professor Harald Haas, from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, is widely recognised as the original founder of Li-Fi. He coined the term Li-Fi and is Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh and co-founder of pureLiFi.

The general term visible light communication (VLC), includes any use of the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit information. The D-Light project at Edinburgh's Institute for Digital Communications was funded from January 2010 to January 2012.Haas promoted this technology in his 2011 TED Global talk and helped start a company to market it. PureLiFi, formerly pureVLC, is an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) firm set up to commercialize Li-Fi products for integration with existing LED-lighting systems.

Li-Fi is a subset of optical wireless communications (OWC) and can be a complement to RF communication (Wi-Fi or Cellular network), or a replacement in contexts of data broadcasting. It is so far measured to be about 100 times faster than Wi-Fi.

With LiFi technology, data travels in the visible light spectrum through LEDs. This makes it possible to provide wireless internet access at speeds of over 100 Gbps(although this is still in the Lab).

  

It is wireless and uses visible light communication or infra-red and near ultraviolet (instead of radio frequency waves) spectrum, part of optical wireless communications technology, which carries much more information, and has been proposed as a solution to the RF-bandwidth limitations.LiFi allows users to roam between lamps and still have connectivity as well as multiple users connecting to the same light and still getting different data streams.
LiFi is different from VLC in:

• Roaming – allows users to move freely between lights and maintain a Skype Video Call.
• Multiple Access – a single light can let different people browse the internet at the same time.

Like Wi-Fi, Li-Fi is wireless and uses similar 802.11 protocols; but it uses visible light communication (instead of radio frequency waves), which has much wider bandwidth.
“All we 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,” Haas told IBTimes UK. “In the future we will not only have 14 billion light bulbs, we may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener and even brighter future,” he added.

Benefits of LiFi:

• Speed
• Security
• Energy Efficiency
• Safety – an alternative to radio waves, with potentially harmful effects
• Data Density
• Localization

LiFi is very interesting as it is related to providing fast internet access in much pure and simpler way, could be the reason for many myths about the technology.
Please go through the below link for more details and myths about the technology.
http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/lifi-internet-might-just-be-100-times-faster-than-wifi-report/