Image: CC0 Public Domain
Tired of slow internet connections and download speeds? Well, you may be in luck. According to an article from Popular Science, some researchers are looking toward LED technology to replace Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi is essentially a series of waves traveling along a narrow, electromagnetic spectrum. The more users, the more crowded and congested the spectrum gets, and the more crowded, the slower connection speeds become. The problem, however, is that researchers cannot create more spectrum to allow the waves to pass faster.
Because of this, some are looking to another solution: LEDs.
This from Popular Science:
If radio waves are like a crowded single-lane road, visible lightwaves are like a wide-open freeway. The solution for faster downloads is to take advantage of this larger swath through LED bulbs. When modified with a signal processor, the bulbs function as semiconductors, embedding digital information within lightwaves.
The LED takeover would be referred to as Li-Fi, or light fidelity. Through this, internet users could potentially see faster connection speeds by streaming data to their devices in the form of LED flashes (not visible to the human eye).
While the technology may not be ready to jump in the market just yet, it has seen immense growth in speed and security since conceptualized in the early 2000s.
If all goes according to plan, researchers involved in Li-Fi hope that an LED-powered street lamp on a block could become a hotspot.
