What is LiFi

What is LiFi ?

LiFi, meaning Light Fidelity,is a term coined by pureLiFi co-founder and CSO, Professor Harald Haas, when he demonstrated LiFi for the first time at a TED talk in 2011,and refers to light based communications technology that delivers a high-speed, bidirectional networked, mobile communications in a similar manner as Wi-Fi. Although Li-Fi can be used to off-load data from existing Wi-Fi networks, implementations may be used to provide capacity for the greater downlink demand such that existing wireless or wired network infrastructure may be used in a complementary fashion.

LiFi is the use of the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit information at very high speeds. This is in contrast to established forms of wireless communication such as Wi-Fi which use traditional radio frequency (RF) signals to transmit data.

With LiFi, data is transmitted by modulating the intensity of the light, which is then received by a photo-sensitive detector, and the light signal is demodulated into electronic form. This modulation is performed in such a way that it is not perceptible to the human eye.

LiFi is a category of Optical Wireless Communications (OWC). OWC includes infra-red and ultra-violet communications as well as visible light. However, LiFi is unique in that the same visible light energy used for illumination may also be used for communication.

How fast 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) lightbulbs to enable data transfer, boasting speeds of up to 224 gigabits per second.