Goodbye Wi-Fi, hellow Li-Fi

[LONDONER]

Well maybe not immediately but it seems it's the future:

http://www.sciencealert.com/li-fi-tested...than-wi-fi

[MFax74]

So if wi-fi is wireless fidelity, li-fi would be light fidelity, right? Doesn't get much faster than the speed of light, so...

[InbetweenDreams]

So if wi-fi is wireless fidelity, li-fi would be light fidelity, right? Doesn't get much faster than the speed of light, so...

Wi-Fi makes use of radio waves, Li-Fi makes use of visible light...both are part of the electromagnetic spectrum...however radio waves have a much longer wavelength than visible light... In a nutshell radio waves and other various wavelengths can pass through objects...think of radio waves and x-rays can penetrate walls and so on.

The disadvantage of Li-Fi will be that the light can't pass through walls, but the advantage is the bandwidth...this is quite literally how "wide" the signal is, the more bandwidth the faster the data rate.

To further put things in perspective, if the entire electromagnetic spectrum were laid out on a football (american football) the portion we call visible light would be less than 1 mm thick.

The bandwidth currently used by WiFi (40 MHz) if represented by light, say the color blue (which has a much smaller wavelength than green or red) you couldn't distinguish the change in color when there would be modulation (data transmitting).