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I'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.
by readams 3y ago
I'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.
- sthuck 3y agoif you have coax cables in the walls then MoCA is a pretty good solution. (Powerline is not) also dear god I hope it's a typo and you meant 1Gb
- debaserab2 3y agoIs MoCA reliable? Just bought a new house and wiring Ethernet into some of the rooms will be tricky, but a previous owner already did coaxial in the whole house.
- Klathmon 3y agoExtremely reliable, but it can get expensive to have to buy a moca to Ethernet adapter at each point. You want to stick with moca 2, and there might be some gotchas with older coax wiring, but I previously ran it for years without issue.
- ryukafalz 3y agoI think I'm running into some of those gotchas with older wiring. I've got moca adapters set up between a few rooms and have periodic dropouts on one of them, which unfortunately is the room with my wifi AP. Traced the cables and the only splitter I can find is a moca 2 aware one, and the coax cable that would have been used for cable internet is unplugged so that's not interfering. Nice when it works, real pain to troubleshoot when it doesn't.
- cj 3y ago2 things that solved my problems with moca was buying a moca adapter to filter the signal out from leaving/entering the house (adapter on the primary incoming coax) and then another adapter on the coax plugging into your cable modem. This fixed some (probably modem specific) problems where internet would randomly drop in the presence of moca.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
- nullc 3y agoThere is no such beast as 1Mb cat5. Do you mean 1gb? Assuming the cables are in conduit you may be able to use the existing cables to pull new cables. This usually works.
- mabbo 3y agoThank you, I had a brain fart and meant Gbit.
- ericbarrett 3y ago> There are 1Gb Cat5 cables inside the cement walls I believe you when you say you can't replace them, but I'm curious why? Every wire I've ever seen run through concrete was in a conduit that could have replacements pulled through it. Did they just run the wires and pour over them?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sclarisse 3y agoIf you need speed and money is of limited concern, consider fiber. There are some nearly invisible configurations that stick onto the walls, and baseboards or crown molding can be a channel as well. It’s possible you could sneak it under a door, or through a small gap in the frame behind the trim. You might even be able to smuggle it through electrical conduit for short distances, since it’s non conductive (but don’t trust me on the safety or compliance issues of that, I wouldn’t trust myself, though I’ve seen zanier from the previous homeowners here...) The obvious downside being the extra expense of media conversion.
- Dylan16807 3y agoAt condo distances you should be able to do 10Gbps over cat5. 2.5Gbps isn't even going out of spec for cat5 and should go the full 100 meters.
- buildbot 3y agoNot always, one link in my condo can only seem to do 5Gbps, 10 will drop the link. Despite several re-crimpings of the connector
- wkat4242 3y agoCould be that it's snagged somewhere, flattening the twisted pairs?
- buildbot 3y agoOh no, maybe, but I would have no way to fix it. The run is literally from one side of the condo to the other, probably through the ceiling or floor. Or it's wired wrong, (and I lost my LED blinker somewhere :( ) because it's like 5Gb/s down and 1Gb/s up. Which is odd...
- withinboredom 3y agoWith no interference, wifi 2.5ghz can go several km at 100mbits.
- Nullabillity 3y agoHow do you plan to provide line of sight through those same walls?
- hulitu 3y agoA power drill can do wonders. /s When everything else fails, ask an RF engineer. Metal is for RF like glass for light.
- Cloudef 3y agoI have apt with only 1 ethernet plug, but coax run to every room, so i used moca adapter to have wired internet everywhere, works great
- cj 3y agoSame, realizing it's possible to convert coax cable outlets into ethernet is a game changer.
- supertrope 3y agoThe same reason people use Bluetooth audio. It's more convenient because there's no cord. (But there's a battery to manage, interference, pairing, and inferior audio quality).
- antonvs 3y agoJust a vaguely related anecdote, I consulted for a company that had two offices on a river, in old converted houses, separated by a marina. Running a cable proved problematic for various reasons, both bureaucratic and relating to the nature of the site. To connect the networks between the two buildings, they had a laser connection set up in the widow's walk on the buildings. It worked great except when it was foggy or raining very heavily, or when the marina moved a sailboat so that its mast blocked the beam.
- fy20 3y agoPoint to point WiFi links are pretty accessible nowadays. I bought a €60 no-name set from Amazon to link two buildings 250m away that don't even have line-of-sight (other buildings and trees are in the way) and it works good enough for my needs (CCTV).
- robinduckett 3y agoTwo university buildings separated by a privately owned house or two springs immediately to mind. Not sure if they still do but my local university used to have IR links between buildings.
- readams 3y agoThey're not talking about point to point links here, but end-user devices.
- blincoln 3y agoOnce it's widespread in consumer gear, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before people start hacking it to operate over longer distances, similar to what's been done with custom WiFi antennas, parabolic dishes, etc.
- flashback2199 3y agoI'm imagining offices that put Li-Fi devices on the ceiling and laptops made with Li-Fi in the edge of the screen lid so that you can just open your laptop and it will start using the Li-Fi for faster speeds.
- lxgr 3y agoSignals not propagating through doors or walls can be an advantage for many applications, both for capacity and privacy reasons.
- haswell 3y agoThis would be fantastic in my current apartment. My immediate surroundings are completely saturated by WiFi access points across both 2.4 and 5.x GHz making all wireless connections unreliable at best, and the layout of my apartment is such that the only way to have a wired connection in the living room where my desktop sits is to run an ethernet cable across the floor. So I run an ethernet cable across the floor, and it's not great. I also think VR/AR use cases may benefit from this eventually.
- wyldfire 3y agoI wonder, does this pollute the IR on your apartment so that your TV remote would no longer work? Although with streaming set-top boxes, those are using RF most of the time these days.
- jorvi 3y agoIt is virtually impossible you’re getting enough distortion from other 5GHz networks to matter, unless your walls are made out of tissue paper. I would recommend analyzing your own devices for faults.
- haswell 3y ago5GHz is significantly better than 2.4, but I still get latency spikes that make it unacceptable for gaming. And my range it atrociously bad. It’s an old building, and I live on the top floor just below a roof with assorted antennas. I think there’s some microwave gear up there that would explain my issues. I’ve wanted to do a site survey for awhile to figure out what’s up, but have just lived with the Ethernet cable across the floor.
- jorvi 3y agoBut that means your distortion issue is not 5GHz networks. Way back when I was still in university, if I would walk out of my room and close the door (which would put a few cm thick wooden door, some plaster wall and about 14m between me and my router) I would already have a significant reduction in connection strength. Even with the ridiculous walls Americans use for their homes, there is just no way a neighbors 5GHz signal is strong enough to cause significant distortion. And if there somehow is, there is enough room on the spectrum to choose a different band. Thinking on it, almost all civilian microwaves also only operates at around 2.4GHz. And since you mention sudden spikes, I would check for radar interference and if you are on a band that’s radar-assigned.
- themoonisachees 3y agoSomeone mentionned VR headsets (if they can actually make the speeds advertised work) Office spaces are going to eat that shit up. They are already running Ethernet everywhere, and they already have many wifi access points. This is probably lower-crosstalk, faster and more localized than wifi.