# Li-Fi Turns Every Lightbulb Into an Ultra-Fast Wireless Network



## TechSocial (Dec 20, 2011)

Current wireless networks have a problem: The more popular they become, the slower they are. Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be 10 times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.

In dense urban areas, the range within which Wi-Fi signals are transmitted is increasingly crowded with noise  mostly, other Wi-Fi signals. Whats more, the physics of electromagnetic waves sets an upper limit to the bandwidth of traditional Wi-Fi. The short version: you can only transmit so much data at a given frequency. The lower the frequency of the wave, the less it can transmit.

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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

Years ago, I was talking to a rather non-technical friend about the effort to detect radio waves from other civilizations. He asked, "What if they are all based on cable?" At the time, I pictured cables running all over the place and laughed. But as time goes on, that idea keeps coming back. We will definitely run out of bandwidth in the radio range very soon. The increasing intensity with which we all are being constantly bombarded with radio waves has many worried about health effects. Maybe light is the next option, or cable.


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