Researchers in English have invented the application of visible light transmission data technology as a challenge

Are you still complaining about too few WIFI hotspots and unstable signals? In the future, if you have a light bulb, you will have wireless network signals, and the transmission speed will be as high as 1 Gbps, much higher than that of WIFI. This technology was invented by Herald Haas, a British university technician, and his team-the use of light to transmit data, often known as visible light communication VLC ). However, there is no obstacle to achieving this technology. First, visible light cannot penetrate the object, so the signal is cut off. In addition, how mobile phones receive optical communication information is also a challenge.

Install a micro-chip to transmit data

According to foreign media reports, Haas said his biggest dream is to turn the light bulb into a broadband communication device. In this way, the light bulb will not only provide lighting, but also become a necessary tool. Haas believes that by adding a micro-chip to an ordinary LED bulb, the bulb will flash at a very fast speed, and the bulb can be used to send data.

The flashing frequency of the light bulb reaches several million times per second. For naked eyes, such flashing is invisible and can only be detected by the photosensitive receiver. In this way, the LED bulb can quickly transmit binary encoding.

The advantage of this technology is obvious: as long as you have a light bulb around you, you can get a wireless Internet connection. It is estimated that the number of bulbs in the world is about 14 billion.

Transmission speed up to 1 Gbps

This visible light communication technology is referred to as "LIFI". Its advantage is not only to make any street lamp in the world an Internet access point, but also to save increasingly scarce RF spectrum resources. Currently, as the main technology of wireless data transmission, WIFI uses RF signals. However, radio waves are only a small part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. However, as users' demand for wireless internet grows, there are fewer and fewer available RF Frequencies.

This is why your network speed slows down as more and more people access the internet. The same is true for 3G wireless networks and for Wi-Fi networks. According to the predictions of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the amount of information people will share in the next 10 years will be 1000 times that of today.

Haas said his technology will be an important part of solving the problem, "the visible spectrum width is 10 thousand times that of the RF spectrum ." This means that visible light communication can bring higher bandwidth. Haas said that the "LIFI" technology can deliver data transmission speeds up to 1 Gbps, much higher than 4G networks. In addition, there is almost no need to create new infrastructure for this technology.

Achieving this technology requires three major obstacles

Will the mobile phone be able to use LIFI soon? Not necessarily! Although this technology has unparalleled advantages, its defects are equally obvious. A technician said visible light could not penetrate objects, so if the receiver is blocked, the signal would be cut off. At the same time, there is no final conclusion on how devices such as mobile phones and tablets can receive visible-light communication signals and ensure stability. In addition, 14 billion lamps seem to be 14 billion hot spots, both indoors and outdoors, but the safety is worrying.

Haas believes that visible light communication is not a competitor of Wi-Fi, but a complementary technology. If the optical signal is blocked and you need to use the device to send information, you can seamlessly switch to the RF signal.

He said the user still needs a Wi-Fi RF communication system. In the short term, visible light communication may be able to implement some applications in a small scope-under water, under oil drilling, or in the Aircraft compartment.