5 ms·
"LiFi" does seem pretty niche. Anywhere you're okay with a 10-15m range, have full line-of-sight, somehow can't run a wire or fiber run, and don't want regular
by tyingq 3y ago
"LiFi" does seem pretty niche. Anywhere you're okay with a 10-15m range, have full line-of-sight, somehow can't run a wire or fiber run, and don't want regular WiFi for whatever reason.
- wincy 3y agoOnly thing I can think of is full fat uncompressed VR streaming to a wireless headset.
- Eisenstein 3y agoCould be useful for modular autonomous robotic devices that act as a single organism, like ants or cells. They would each do their own thing but communicate using this (or something else fast, short-range, and error-resilient) so as to work towards a unified goal without a lot of redundancy.
- slashdev 3y agoNiche also means it will be expensive.
- anyfactor 3y agoThat is like saying, "handing a 2tb hard drive to someone is 1500x times the download speed of wifi".
- Kon-Peki 3y ago"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." https://archive.org/details/computernetworks02tane/page/56/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/computernetworks02tane/page/56/m...
- amluto 3y agoI can think of two uses: Open floor plan offices. (Sigh.) Datacenters or server rooms. This could give quite nice data rates within a rack.
- dsr_ 3y agoAny place you have this in a point-to-point rig, you could have fiber cables guiding the light and creating a private collision domain, improving overall bandwidth, reliability and security. The cost of datacenters is not currently constrained by fiber.
- amluto 3y agoFiber is not free to run. In an open floor plan office with 20 workstations on an overgrown table, you could run 20 fiber pairs (or cat5e cables or cat6a cables), and you could terminate them and connect them, or you could set up one LiFi access point and 20 client devices. The latter is a lot less cable bundle and a lot less labor.
- dsr_ 3y agoThis can be done now with wifi. The question I answered was about datacenters. There is wifi in datacenters -- usually for the benefit of visiting techs. Not for inside a rack. Incidentally, if asked to set up 20 workstations on an overgrown table, and it's not a very temporary thing while the office is in turmoil, I recommend finding a different employer.
- lostlogin 3y agoMaybe this is the solution to my niche issue. Better network speeds in a room surrounded by Faraday cages with MR scanners in them. Optical is an option but a right pita to run without holing the cage or circumnavigating it.