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Infrared may no longer be a punchline, as IEEE approves 9.6Gbps wireless light
- hilbert42 3y agoWhy such a puny speed?
- dist-epoch 3y agoIt's faster than most computers wired Ethernet.
- coltonweaver 3y agoThe theoretical limit of WiFi 6E is 2,500Mbps: https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/wi-fi-6-vs-wifi-6e https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/wi-fi-6-vs-wifi-... This would be nearly 4X that.
- hilbert42 3y agoPerhaps so, but this new standard reminds me of the born-dead USB1 standard, which at the time of its launch was so slow as to be almost useless. This new optical standard is only about 50% faster than the now-ancient copper SATA standard of 6Gbps. It has stuff-all reserve for future development! Every time we have one of these new standards, Wi-Fi whatever, they are just a bit above the previous standard and never at the limits of the tech. There is never enough reserve to give them decent longevity. It's as if those manufacturers involved in setting standards were making a standard that would be quickly obsolescent—that is, they'd guarantee ongoing production/sales without much effort. It's been such a consistent problem for so long that it has shades of the Phoebus cartel about it. As always, the user ends up paying more because of premature (planned) obsolescence.
- supertrope 3y agoElectronics is an extremely cost conscious industry. There's not a viable market for massive jumps forward if the laptop would cost 10x. Approaching the Shannon Limit also is at odds with maximizing battery life. Recent Macbooks only have 2x2 MIMO. Presumably 3x3 MIMO used relatively too much power, space, or BOM.
- hilbert42 3y agoFine but this is an optical standard, and if worried about power then automatic and or fixed limit throttling could remedy the problem. The link sp332 has provided says it all, reckon it supports my case.
- fulafel 3y agoIR is 0.3-100 THz, so the bands can be very wide and don't need to approach theoretical bandwidth efficiency limits to get lots of bits over, no?
- hilbert42 3y agoRight.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoIt's not competing with SATA, it's competing with WiFi.
- hilbert42 3y agoOK, at the end of my WiFi I have a SATA or much faster drive (or any other data source) attached. So the WiFi becomes the transport layer in the OSI model. It's the throughput data rate that matters not the type of devices that are connected at either end of the link (nor the protocol by which they're connected). .
- zokier 3y ago> This new optical standard is only about 50% faster than the now-ancient copper SATA standard of 6Gbps you are surprised that free-space optical transfer over many(?) meters is "only" 50% faster than data transfer over <1m carefully constructed differential coax-pairs?
- Dylan16807 3y agoSata is pretty far from careful, the 6Gbps rating is for one pair, and that was 15 years ago.
- eropple 3y ago> It's been such a consistent problem for so long that it has shades of the Phoebus cartel about it. Which wasn't what the general public thinks it is and, much like equating short-run in-device transports with lossy, room-distance ones, is a good signal that one is comparing apples and trailer trucks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
- Pet_Ant 3y agoWell the speed is the speed of light, ideally this should have low latency. The datarate will be effected by how quickly you can turn on and off the light and that will have some limits.
- bragr 3y agoAs apposed to radio waves which also travel at the speed of light?
- bombela 3y agoLight and radio waves are the same physical phenomenon. The difference is the frequency. Light is much much higher frequency than radio. Nuclear radiation are even higher frequency. Maximum throughput with maximum damage!
- manmal 3y agoLatency in WiFi comes from interference and contention (wait until other devices have finished sending; this has improved with Wifi6 AFAIK), and some other, probably less significant factors. Travel time of the signal through air should be the same.
- sp332 3y agoThe LiFi page claims much higher speeds. https://lifi.co/lifi-speed/ https://lifi.co/lifi-speed/
- hilbert42 3y agoRight, now look at this standard by comparison.
- zokier 3y agoThat 224GB/s figure is some serious bullshitting. For comparison, the fastest optical ethernet transfer over fiber is 800Gbps or 100GB/s, and even that is over 8 fiber pairs and still in-development tech. Claiming to do over twice of that in free-space with "common household LED light bulbs" is pretty ridiculous.
- hilbert42 3y ago224GB/s is unrealistically fast but 9Gb/s unacceptably slow. A compromise of 9GB/s would perhaps be reasonable. 1/25th the speed would be manageable. "common household LED light bulbs" is pretty ridiculous." Likely so, but all we have to do for 9GB/s is to use the transmitters and receivers used in standard commercial fiber optics (or a suitable adaptation thereof) and we'd romp home.
- hulitu 3y ago> That 224GB/s figure is some serious bullshitting It is the same for every new technology. It was the same with 4G, 5G. In DE mobile operators do not offer HSPA at the same time with 4G so you cannot compare how crap the 4G is.
- fulafel 3y agoPeople seem to be conditioned to the choppy and slow wifi speeds, so slower-than-Ethernet speeds can still sound appealing in comparison.
- hilbert42 3y agoRight, I think conditioning is definitely part of it, but my point was (as I hinted elsewwhere) the move to optical would have allowed for a vastly better performance with little additional overhead.
- coltonweaver 3y agoAm I correct that this would require direct line-of-sight for any device using an antenna[0] enabling this? It seems a bit impractical for your typical consumer use-cases if so, but maybe beneficial for some more commercial scenarios. Would love to know if I am wrong here though! It seems very interesting. 0: https://www.purelifi.com/products/light-antenna-one/ https://www.purelifi.com/products/light-antenna-one/
- dist-epoch 3y agoThe idea is to put it in the ceiling (lightbulbs). Light bounce also works, so if you are in a typical room the walls also become antennas.
- hfkwer 3y agoSo if you turn your back on the ceiling light you lose your connection?
- assimpleaspossi 3y agoLight reflects off most surfaces so not necessarily.
- cillian64 3y agoI think the idea is you have normal wifi as well, so you should never lose the connection but certain preferred positions will go much faster using light.
- zadler 3y agoYears later, we’ll find out that it messes with people’s sleep…
- Havoc 3y agoOr pets can see it and don’t appreciate the disco
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoModulating it at several hundred Mhz, the pets won't be able to see it flicker.
- gnicholas 3y agoWould this be easier to intercept from a distance?
- letitbeirie 3y agoProbably harder in a practical sense - its signal doesn't travel through walls or most commercial windows so the intercepting sensor would have to be located in the same room (if indoors) or have a heroic signal/noise ratio to avoid getting washed out by sunlight (if not).
- gweinberg 3y agoStrange title. If infrared is the punchline, what's the joke?
- antonvs 3y agoI imagine the idea is that infrared communication itself is a joke, if you need higher speeds or have any objects in the path of the beam.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoDoes anyone even need 9.6Gbps wireless?
- supertrope 3y agoWireless laptop dock is one application. A 1080p monitor signal is 3.2 Gbps. Dual monitors is 6.4 Gbps. One "4K" display is 12.5 Gbps. Wireless is notorious for quoting numbers that include protocol overhead and assume a near zero noise and congestion environment. The typical layer 7 throughput of 802.11 is about half of the link rate. Of course it goes down from there without line of sight in the same room.
- sedatk 3y ago640Mbps ought to be enough for everyone.
- dvngnt_ 3y agowirelessly streaming vr
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoIt seems that VR is the only reasonable application.
- readams 3y agoI'm curious who has a problem that this solves. You need to have line of sight to something very nearby. So you'd need to wire 10Gb Ethernet to the LiFi points. But then why not just use wired Ethernet?
- ugjka 3y agoairports would be one case
- NortySpock 3y agoConference halls, open plan offices, LAN parties, maybe data scientist teams sharing large datasets around a room...
- afavour 3y ago> But then why not just use wired Ethernet? This is a recurring question and one often answered by “people rent houses/apartments and can’t just run cables through the walls”. I’m not all that sure what I’d use this specific technology for over Wifi but I can understand why people don’t use wired Ethernet.
- mabbo 3y agoI own my condo but have this exact issue. There are 1Gb Cat5 cables inside the cement walls and I cannot replace them if they ever break, nor upgrade them. Already this is a problem as I have 1.Gbit internet. Edit: I am silly and wrote Mbit instead of Gbit.
- rayiner 3y agoWhat is one meg cat5? Isn’t cat5 rated to one gig?
- ElectricalUnion 3y agoCAT5 is in theory only rated for Fast Ethernet (100M) while CAT5e is rated for Gigabit Ethernet. In practice is very hard to actually find a cable that meets only CAT5 and not CAT5e.
- letitbeirie 3y agoThis is pretty cool - being able to identify/segregate traffic by its physical room seems like it would be a useful tool for anyone in security, university professors giving exams, etc. I can't really see it totally replacing WiFi though. It's hard enough to get a TV remote to work outside in the shade - getting higher-bandwidth IR-based WiFi to work outside in the sun seems... ambitious?
- dragontamer 3y agoIrDA above 115kbps is basically dead, and I don't think anything beyond 4MBps is feasible (ie: months spent on an FPGA to handle all the issues) I'm a big fan of using simplified IrDA in 2023 in hobby electronics. But I don't see a smooth path to 9.6Gbps. 1Mbps to 10Mbps is already exhausting for me to think about. -------------- Is there any industry chip with planned development to handle this standard? Finding a damn LED and Photodiode that is guaranteed faster than 20ns to feasibly handle 4Mbit is horrifying. Let alone the signal processing circuits (I think you need 20Mhz OpAmps which isn't a 6001 or lm358 if you know what I mean) or FPGAs needed to handle this relatively low speeds. Or are we doing some kind of multi-frequency multi LED thing? Are there any LEDs or Photodiode that can emit and detect such a narrow band? What are the sources of IR noise to mess with those frequencies? ------- Oh, but 115kHz is plenty useful for a hobbyist and I highly recommend people playing with that.
- zokier 3y agoI suspect that IEEE 802.15.7 might be more up your alley, maybe also .13 (esp the pm phy variant).
- flashback2199 3y agoEdit: I re-read your comment and I think I see what you might have meant now. I think you were asking if there would be a solution for low speed devices to use this standard.
- dragontamer 3y agoI'm asking if the LEDs that support 9.6Gbps (what is that? A 1ns or faster LED?) even exist in any substantial way. Isn't that like, laser speeds? Not overhead LED speeds. And over the air? Not inside a fiber line? This is basically a 10Gbps standard for fiber lines except over the air. All those issues need to be solved without the guarantees or isolation that fiber optic lines provide. That's just transmit. Receive has to deal with the same issues, amplifiers and other electronics that move at the requested speeds.
- 3y ago
- RobotToaster 3y agoAs someone pretty sensitive to CFL/LED flicker, the idea of this being everywhere is worrying.
- newaccount74 3y agoLED flicker is 50 or 60 Hertz, this technology would be Giga-Hertz. And it's infrared. Your eyes won't see a thing.
- mrob 3y ago50 or 60Hz is low enough that even people who aren't sensitive can notice it. Cheap LED lighting more often flickers at 100 or 120Hz, using a bridge rectifier with a series capacitor to limit the current.
- hulitu 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroboscopic_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroboscopic_effect
- fatfox 3y agoit’s invisible
- sp1rit 3y agoI remember my old Nokia brick having the ability to send files and apps through an infrared thingy on its side. You could simply hold two phones side by side from each other and transfer data, but I remember handly anyone using it (I guess it was kind of akwad to use - but probably still simpler than getting the devices paird with bluethooth). It wasn't nearly as fast the advertised speeds mentioned in the article.
- ksec 3y agoOh FFS. So they approve 9.6Gbps Li-Fi aka IEEE 802.11bb, and the devices shown in the photo used inside a prototype is only capable of 1Gbps, but every article including one submitted last week said "100x Faster " [1] than WiFi at 224GB/s or 1792Gbps. And just like 802.11be and 802.11ax, I had to read up on the actual Spec again to understand WTF is going on instead of relying tech reporting. And this isn't just a problem with reporting, the actual PR of Li-Fi cant even do half its job. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36707789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36707789
- spdustin 3y agoI’d be curious to know how it impacts things like FaceID. Or if bathing a room with rapidly modulated IR would affect thermography (as used in, say, energy efficiency audits).
- wiradikusuma 3y ago"..instead of having wifi that someone can tap into.." so, use Ethernet cable?
- throitallaway 3y agoA lot of this does feel like reinventing the wheel. However, it's slightly more convenient than being tethered with a wire.
- gochi 3y agoSure let me attach an ethernet cable to my VR headset, and then magically pull another from the wall to attach to my laptop. Can't forget the mystical third wire which I need for my phone! Hopefully it doesn't take much to grasp the benefits of ethernet without a cable directly to your device at all times, right?
- DaSHacka 3y agoBut those devices, particularly the VR headset and mobile phone, are not good candidates for an IR-based networking solution as their use-case inherently has a lot of movement. What good is a VR headset that loses connection with the host computer when you accidentally block the receiver while moving around?
- ianburrell 3y agoThe Li-Fi works with light bounce. Like light bulb illuminates the whole room, the access point should be able to see any device in the room. Might need to make sure the "antenna" doesn't get blocked completely so probably need to be on top of device. It would be perfect for VR headset, a cheap version of 60GHz WiGig.
- makeitdouble 3y agoWouldn't that require a pretty hefty amount of redundancy and error control, heavily lowering the throughput ? The actual device speeds is already way lower than what is touted in the title, so at the end of the day it would be less practical than plain wi-fi from an antenna in your room (except if you're really affected by other longer range signals that touch even the 5Ghz band)
- deepnotderp 3y agoOne day the use of self-accelerating beams (which can bend/turn by themselves) may remove the line of sight limitation. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/7/4/341 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/7/4/341
- hparadiz 3y agoIf I have a room full of these can they communicate with each other to provide a connection? This reminds me of base stations for my VR setup where my feet trackers will sometimes lose connection due to a physical obstacle like a desk. The solution is to add more base stations typically or make your space more sparse.
- gochi 3y agoThey ran a case study at a school, you can scroll down and see their overview setup which did what you're talking about, a room full of them providing a connection: https://www.purelifi.com/case-studies/lifi-in-the-classroom/ https://www.purelifi.com/case-studies/lifi-in-the-classroom/
- jimmytidey 3y agoI remember reading that Royal Navy engineers maintaining nuclear submarines use Li-Fi to connect their workstations to the network. They said it was a security requirement - does seem extraordinarily elaborate. It feels like using wires could have been a simpler answer...
- jchanimal 3y agoWires likely permit too much side-channel to be safe.
- throitallaway 3y agoInteresting and agreed. Is it more secure (or less detectable) than Ethernet? I suppose Ethernet has some form of magnetic radiation. I wonder what all this infrared light bouncing around will do to us monkeys.
- njanirudh 3y agoIs https://youtu.be/Rw-QZuGVP3o https://youtu.be/Rw-QZuGVP3o somehow related to the technology in the article.
- blincoln 3y agoSeems like the fact that it's a "tightbeam" vs. WiFi's broad coverage could result in some fun niche hacks like tiny autotracking IR transceiver turrets that follow devices around a room or (working together to hand off the connection) a building, or larger versions that keep two transceivers pointing at each other over a longer point-to-point link. Who will be the first hobbyists to establish a LiFi link bounced off of one of the old retroflectors on the moon? If the IR is bright enough, it might even make sense to put a NIR camera in every access point so it can double as an unobtrusive security camera, and/or track devices (for beam-forming, forensic information for physical security staff, etc.).
- jdblair 3y agoNo mechanical turrets needed! Just use a flat, stationary, phased array infrared emitter.
- nuccy 3y agoDo you have a reference on any of those? I can only find papers about lab setups. Since wavelength of IR is much shorter phase control of different emitter is much harder to accomplish than in the radio. Moreover thermal deformation of the device would affect the phases much more significantly.
- jdblair 3y agoIt's a joke. It’s not practical.
- Animats 3y agoHP used to sell an infrared LAN. Little red ceiling domes in offices. It wasn't popular, but it did work.
- Havoc 3y agoGiven how much people struggle with vanilla routers I’d say anything requiring line of sight could be challenging. I could see it being supplemental though. Wifi and this sorta like anycast
- firefoxd 3y agoNot to bash on this tech, but at the close proximity and fixture it requires, why not a wired connection?
- atum47 3y agoThere were some research in the past where they can turn WIFI signal into video (seeing through walls, detecting humans...). I wonder how easier this will make things for them...
- 6510 3y agoPerhaps it would even be useful to do networking use audio (like dial up sounds or cassette tapes) One could carefully pick sounds to be the least annoying and have [say] a printer announce to the world that it is still online. One could probably transfer well over 50kb/s but it hardly seems necessary if one rarely prints anything. I already scream at rarely used printers it would be great if it would listen for print jobs. It could take dictation too. Perhaps it is funny to have the entire print order in human speech. Iphones have some weird feature to listen for coughing or water(?) We already have door bells and door knockers sending out audio signals. (Video doorbells are great but knockers are more reliable.) Lots of devices in the home make identifiable sounds. Combined with the security footage you could generate a film of you using your wireless drill, every time you look in the fridge, open the front door, when you shoot someone, etc "vacuum cleaning the movie". The vacuum cleaner can be asked for a status report, its serial, build date etc, how full its bag is utilizing a human friendly machine readable audio signal. It seems much more secure than evil men silently communicating with your devices over the internet. I think we are onto something here.
- elcritch 3y agoWhere I believe LiFi options would be great is to eliminate HDMI / Display Port cables to monitors or TVs. Just one less wire to run and figure out how to hide. Well at least until wireless energy systems get better. ;) Or to have a desktop computer across the room from a display and be able to switch displays.
- kbumsik 3y agoI wonder how it offers bi-directional communication? Do mobile devices have to have small light bulb (like infrared) to support bi-drectional communication? It would be too big for modern smartphone though.