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October 15, 2014

pureLifi Presents The World's First 'Li-Fi' Network

A light communications technology company known as pureLiFi, formed in 2012, has successfully created the world’s first Li-Fi network and will soon release it to consumers.

Li-Fi is a term coined by pureLiFi Chief Science Officer (CSO) and co-founder Harald Haas, referring to a networking technology that is similar to Wi-Fi but relies on visible light communication (VLC) to transmit data. In other words, high speed information can be transmitted from LED bulbs in the form of visible light instead of using radio frequency communication, which conserves bandwidth while vastly improving data densities and speeds.

It may be worth noting that the name is a bit of a misnomer, as the data being transmitted is not actually perceivable to the human eye.

As an “atto-cellular” communication system, a Li-Fi network relies on a sort of grid of bulbs functioning as access points instead of on a central piece of infrastructure like a Wi-Fi router. Users are then automatically served by the nearest access point for an optimized network connection. This seamless transition process from bulb to bulb is known as “handover.”

From a market perspective the network will be known as Li-Flame, a second generation product that replaces the point-to-point transmission technology of Li-1st. Li-Flame is instead being touted as the world’s first ubiquitous high-speed, bidirectional wireless networking solution.

A Li-Flame Ceiling Unit attaches to an LED fixture and forms an atto-cell, providing the illuminated area with network coverage, and the addition of several more allows a quite substantial area to be covered. Li-Flame will begin shipping to industry consumers as early as Q4 of 2014, not long after Li-1st’s launch in Q1 of the same year.

“pureLiFi provides ubiquitous high-speed wireless access that offers substantially greater security, safety and data densities than Wi-Fi along with inherent properties that eliminate unwanted external network intrusion,” the company stated on its homepage. “In addition, the integration of illumination and data services generates a measurable reduction in both infrastructure complexity and energy consumption.”

This technology has tremendous implications for the technology world, as demonstrated in the Visible Light Communications/Light Fidelity and Free Space Optics Market report by MarketsAndMarkets in July 2014. The research firm expects the Li-Fi industry, only in its infancy, to grow to an incredible $9 billion by 2020 and revolutionize mobile Internet and the Internet of Things in the process.




Edited by Maurice Nagle


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