Light-based “LiFi” is stunningly fast, notably fragile—and now standardized

Article note: Free space optical networking is always nifty. This is a _drastically_ more sophisticated/complicated protocol stack than most of the other recent interesting ones (802.11bb implies a whole ass 802.11 stack!) and it sounds like all the compliant implementations are rather expensive right now, but it's neat.

Enlarge / "I can't believe the quality of this 8K video tutorial! It's like you're really… Ted, could you, yeah, just shift over a little there? You're blocking… thanks." (credit: LiFi.Co)

Light is almost certainly the fastest thing around. So it makes sense that "light-based wireless communications," or LiFi, could blow the theoretical doors off existing radio-wave wireless standards, to the tune of a maximum 224GB per second.

So long as there's nothing blocking the space between your receiver and the lightbulb you've fashioned into a LiFi access point. Or you don't need to turn the bulb off entirely to sleep. And you're willing to add a dongle and keep it pointed the right way, at least for the moment.

But LiFi, or 802.11bb, isn't really meant to replace Wi-Fi, but complement it—a good thing for a technology theoretically nullified by a sheet of printer paper. In an announcement of the standard's certification by IEEE (spotted on PC Gamer) and on LiFiCO's FAQ page, the LED-based wireless standard is pitched as an alternative for certain use cases. LiFi could be useful when radio frequencies are inhibited or banned, when the security of the connection is paramount, or just whenever you want speed-of-light transfer at the cost of line-of-sight alignment.