News 100x Faster Than Wi-Fi: Li-Fi, Light-Based Networking, Standard Released

[Admin]

The new 802.11bb Li-Fi standard is claimed to be super fast, and now it has been published adoption should take-off.

100x Faster Than Wi-Fi: Li-Fi, Light-Based Networking, Standard Released : Read more

 

[peachpuff]

Show me some demos of this, if i have to hold my phone a certain way or be in a certain spot or not move to keep a connection or have exposed bulbs in my room this will be a deal breaker.

 

[bill001g]

It also gets into the question of why bother. You do not really need super fast speeds to a device like a cell phone or pad device you will just fill the storage quicker. Its not like you are downloading microsoft flight simulator to a phone.

If it is a desktop computer and it must be in the same room as the router you might as well run a ethernet cable and avoid the complexity.

Only thing I could see is maybe vr units so you could have only the display in the headset to cut the weight.

 

[annymmo]

Seems very interesting for streaming video to (and from) wireless AR/VR/MR/XR/etc. headsets.

 

[LuxZg]

Seems very interesting for streaming video to (and from) wireless AR/VR/MR/XR/etc. headsets.

It would be, but only if you retain full freedom of movement inside the VR space. If it loses connection when I rotate my head it's useless. Yet article said nothing about restrictions... and I have a bad feeling there are plenty of them

 

[MiniITXEconomy]

Pipggybacking off of your existing electrical grid sounds nice, but I imagine that means the end of enclosed fixtures inside your home if you plan to adopt this, properly, and always having the lights on inside your home office sounds like a major hassle. Imagine sitting at your desk, with the dimmer switch for your bare overhead light set to maximum, because you need all that bandwidth...

But I feel like I'm not seeing the bigger picture. Could my PS5 beam it's image to my TV using this tech, nixing any need for an HDMI cable? Couldn't you theoretically attach a WIFI router to a LIFI sensor, thereby creating your own centralized bedroom network? And what about homes with poor wiring? Hell, I can't run my vacuum inside my game room without the lights in my bathroom flickering.

May seem like basic questions, but this is my first day hearing about LIFI. I gotta say, I like what I'm hearing, though.

 

[PEJUman]

light is just visible RF.... recall 60 GHz nearfield wifi? Intel AD/HTC vive wiress devices anyone? aka WiGig.
very high bandwidth, can barely pass paper/carboard obstacles?

Visible wavelength range is 400 ~ 770K Ghz, aka 400~770 Thz. Talk about line of sight & stuff better be transparent in-between the devices (like smoke/suspended particles/humidity/etc).

 

[pixelpusher220]

Pipggybacking off of your existing electrical grid sounds nice, but I imagine that means the end of enclosed fixtures inside your home if you plan to adopt this, properly, and always having the lights on inside your home office sounds like a major hassle. Imagine sitting at your desk, with the dimmer switch for your bare overhead light set to maximum, because you need all that bandwidth...

But I feel like I'm not seeing the bigger picture. Could my PS5 beam it's image to my TV using this tech, nixing any need for an HDMI cable? Couldn't you theoretically attach a WIFI router to a LIFI sensor, thereby creating your own centralized bedroom network? And what about homes with poor wiring? Hell, I can't run my vacuum inside my game room without the lights in my bathroom flickering.

May seem like basic questions, but this is my first day hearing about LIFI. I gotta say, I like what I'm hearing, though.

Home based may not be the real use case. The significant bandwidth increase seems tailor made for commercial applications. Another ceiling fixture there isn't a big deal. Especially indoor stadiums, tho perhaps range would be an issue.

Line of site req's make mobile devices that can't have an omni directional antenna might be problematic. if the wrong side of a phone is down it can't connect

 

[edzieba]

Everything old is new again: before Bluetooth, there was IrDA

 

[Thunder64]

Did anybody read the article? It uses IR, not visible light. You won't have to light up your house to use it. Also, this isn't for residental use or connecting cell phones, etc.

I see it as an alternative to wired for long distance that are within line of sight. You would have a huge bandwidth link between those devices which would then use traditional WiFi to connect to devices nearby.

 

[YSCCC]

needing to use a flashing light source and reciever sounds like wireless optical fibre.. but without the fibre you need to have a strong light flashing constantly into an area and the client end need to flash back to communicate, I can't really percieve this to be useful outside of say, commercial storage server for hot swarpping drives. for civilian use having a overhead light keep shining and my phone/computer shine back don't seem like a good idea for eye fatigue or light pollution

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Now imagine this paired with a IR Laser Pointer and Long Distance Transceivers pointing at each other for "Full Duplex" communication.

I wonder how far you can make the connection work.

 

[palladin9479]

Everything old is new again: before Bluetooth, there was IrDA

This is exactly what I was thinking about. This just sounds like a better IrDA implimentation.

 

[edzieba]

Now imagine this paired with a IR Laser Pointer and Long Distance Transceivers pointing at each other for "Full Duplex" communication.

I wonder how far you can make the connection work.

Longest recorded free-space laser data link is 24 million km.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Longest recorded free-space laser data link is 24 million km.

I wonder how much use-able bandwidth we can get using Li-Fi over that range.

There must be some signal loss sending the laser that far out.

 

[bit_user]

Pipggybacking off of your existing electrical grid sounds nice

I'm sure that's only one possible implementation. And, in order to get speeds in the gigabit range, you'd definitely need additional cabling to your light fixture. Cat 6 uses shielded, twisted-pair for good reasons.

Could my PS5 beam it's image to my TV using this tech, nixing any need for an HDMI cable?

There was a Samsung TV which used a light beam for communication between its base and the panel. I think the idea was that you'd have an A/C outlet on the wall, behind the panel, and the base would connect to all your various A/V equipment, avoiding a bunch of unsightly cables having to dangle from the panel, itself.

May seem like basic questions, but this is my first day hearing about LIFI. I gotta say, I like what I'm hearing, though.

Yeah, the article was much too vague. A quick web search turned up references to the standard going back at least as far back as 2018, so it's been gestating for quite a while (not surprisingly, considering the number and range of potential issues).

My first question was whether it's going to be a unidirectional broadcast medium, with something like wi fi being used for the return channel. However, it seems the standard defines communication in both directions. I'm going to guess you'd typically pair it with wi fi as a fallback, for cases where the path gets occluded. For high-bandwidth scenarios, where a fallback isn't viable, you'd need redundant transceivers in different locations.

 

[bit_user]

It would be, but only if you retain full freedom of movement inside the VR space. If it loses connection when I rotate my head it's useless.

Yes, which is why they'd put enough sensors to cover all directions.

If early VR headsets could use "light houses" for tracking, which also required continuous visibility, then it seems plausible optical communication can work for it. You would probably need at least two transmitters, in case one of them got occluded by your arm or something.

Visible wavelength range is 400 ~ 770K Ghz, aka 400~770 Thz. Talk about line of sight & stuff better be transparent in-between the devices (like smoke/suspended particles/humidity/etc).

If there's so much smoke or fog in your room that it's hard to see through, you've got other problems.

Line of site req's make mobile devices that can't have an omni directional antenna might be problematic. if the wrong side of a phone is down it can't connect

When visibility is blocked, your phone could just fall-back to wi fi or 5g.

Everything old is new again: before Bluetooth, there was IrDA

Isn't IrDA point-to-point? I think this is a cocktail party protocol, allowing for one-to-many or many-to-many.

 

[void555]

Has anyone actually tried to read the standard in question or at least its summary? 802.11bb is up to 9.6 Gbit/s. Slightly lower than 224 Gigabytes/s, isn't it?
It is slower than Wi-Fi 7 which you can buy today.

 

[bit_user]

Has anyone actually tried to read the standard in question or at least its summary?

I poked around, but the actual standard seems to sit behind a paywall. Do you have links to any late drafts* or good summaries?

* standards drafts are sometimes free.

 

[bill001g]

Now imagine this paired with a IR Laser Pointer and Long Distance Transceivers pointing at each other for "Full Duplex" communication.

I wonder how far you can make the connection work.

I used to work for a company that made device like this for areas that it was not possible to get a point to point microwave license.
This was close to 30 years ago so it used different technology than this new standard but this is not a new idea. It used to run at T1 speed ie 1.5mbps which was fast for the day.

It had all kinds of issues related to weather or even bright sunlight at times. Fog used to kill it. It was still better than nothing when you had no other options.

Indoors we will see. As mentioned the 60ghz wifi standard that was to be used for similar function went nowhere.

 

[edzieba]

If early VR headsets could use "light houses" for tracking, which also required continuous visibility, then it seems plausible optical communication can work for it. You would probably need at least two transmitters, in case one of them got occluded by your arm or something.

Sensor occlusion for HMDs can happen even with wide sensor coverage (e.g. bending over), but because the IMU is still present and operating a few hunrded ms of tracking dropout can be tolerated before drift starts to accumulate excessively. Drop the video link for a few hundred ms however, and you have dropped multiple frames. Even dropping a few ms either drops a frame or corrupts a frame requiring retransmission (adding double that dropped ms to motion-to-photons latency, where your total budget is 20ms).
Running multiple transmitters in the same volume is also not so simple: a 'dumb' approach with synchronised transmitters broadcasting the same signal still has harsh timing constraints, and exacerbates multipath issues (e.g. reflective surfaces), and a 'smart' approach means handling handover and contention between multiple transmitters a single receiver may be within view of.

In the early VR days (pre CV1 and Vive) people experimented with off-the-shelf wireless HDMI transceivers. Those used UWB for transmission, and even the ones that could do so with sufficiently low latency had issues with dropout from occlusion and reacquisition.

 

[jp7189]

As a VR enthusiast, I'm super excited by this. I used a vive pro 1 wireless for years and loved it. A single 60GHz transmitter was enough to cover my space and I never had dropouts due to signal issues, but it wasn't enough bandwidth to drive higher resolutions, and VR has moved way past vp1 resolution. AFAIK there's nothing out there that can drive dual 4k screens, and that feels about where VR really takes off.

Additionally, I had to add a supplemental fan to the VP1 wireless, and I got the feeling that adding enough compute power to perform real-time, 4k/8k, high quality compression was out. Hopefully, high bandwidth lifi can help solve that problem.

 

[void555]

I poked around, but the actual standard seems to sit behind a paywall. Do you have links to any late drafts* or good summaries?

* standards drafts are sometimes free.

IEEE itself summarizes it: https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/802.11bb/10823/

802.11bb was originally planned to achieve "at least 5 Gb/s" (https://www.ieee802.org/11/PARs/P802_11bb_PAR_Detail.pdf)

 

[TJ Hooker]

Did anybody read the article? It uses IR, not visible light. You won't have to light up your house to use it. Also, this isn't for residental use or connecting cell phones, etc.

The LiFi concept seems to encompass both IR and visible light. Eg see the FAQ here: https://lifi.co/lifi-faqs/

I think there's the broader LiFi concept, and then there's the more specific 802.11bb spec, and this article sort of conflates the two. E.g. it talks about LiFi speeds of up to 224 GB/s, whereas the 802.11bb PHY only goes up to 9.6 Gbps. And 802.11bb seems to only deal with IR (800 to 1000 nm band), not visible spectrum.

Edit: There's also IEEE 802.15.7, which deals with optical wireless comms, not sure how/if that relates to LiFi.

 

[Makaveli]

Home based may not be the real use case. The significant bandwidth increase seems tailor made for commercial applications. Another ceiling fixture there isn't a big deal. Especially indoor stadiums, tho perhaps range would be an issue.

Line of site req's make mobile devices that can't have an omni directional antenna might be problematic. if the wrong side of a phone is down it can't connect

This!

I can see it being very good in an Office setting and even a subway tunnel where it's hard to get wifi access. This will definitely be more commercial than an end user at home.