Jonathan Garcia

13 March 2016

Whether youre using wireless internet in a coffee shop, stealing it from the guy next door, or
competing for bandwidth at a conference, youve probably gotten frustrated at the slow speeds
you face when more than one device is tapped into the network. As more and more people and
their many devices access wireless internet, clogged airwaves are going to make it increasingly
difficult to latch onto a reliable signal. But radio waves are just one part of the spectrum that can
carry our data. What if we could use other waves to surf the internet or any other alternate?
The first wireless signals to see practical use were Morse code broadband blasts of spark
generated noise, interfering with any other signal within range. The invention of tuning allowed
multiple signals to share the spectrum; better antennas meant the same frequencies could be
reused without mutual interference; amplitude and frequency modulation meant more
information could be carried on each signal.
The biggest break for wireless, as for all electronics, was the triumph of the transistor over the
valve. From the 50s onwards. Moore's Law gave, and continues to give, engineers the ability to
do more and more work on signals with lower power requirements and less cost.
Wireless is doing particularly well from that process. All current techniques such as 02.11ac,
LTE and 60GHz rely on combining multiple channels across frequencies and spatial paths,
processing multiple channels at once is an ideal task for today's massively parallel giga-transistor
chip architectures. This also ties in well with SDR (Software-Defined Radio) which relies on

very fast processors to replicate mathematically the sort of signal processing that dedicated
electronic circuits used to do. This means that a single SDR can manage multiple standards just
by changing its programming, leading to some predictions that one chip could do the three main
classes of wireless i.e. PAN, LAN and WAN (Personal, Local and Wide-area Networking). As
yet, however, this remains economically less preferable than having some separation of services.
The next generation of general-purpose wireless network builds on ideas that saw first
deployment in its predecessor which introduced MIMO (Multiple In, Multiple Out) to the mass
market. By running multiple transmitters and receivers on the same channel but to multiple
antennas, MIMO makes use of the tiny timing differences in the paths between each
transmitter/receiver combination of to create parallel channels.
The 802.11n standard specified up to four parallel spatial channels, with individual channels set
to a maximum of 40MHz bandwidth; 802.11ac increases that to eight parallel channels of
80MHz minimum, 160MHz optional. It also uses slightly more efficient ways to code the data
onto the transmission channel: however, these are so close to the theoretical maximum i.e. the
Shannon Limit that future improvements will have to come from wider channels and more of
them.
In place of MIMO, spatial channels are created with beam forming or AAS (Adaptive Antenna
Steering). Individual antennas at 60GHz are very small barely a couple of millimeters long, so
densely populated arrays can be easily built and configured to create dynamic, tight beams that
track moving devices. Known as 802.11ad (Gi-Fi) 60GHz Wi-Fi is specified to provide 7Gbps,
although only at ranges of up to 10 meters and not through walls or windows. There, the standard
will fall back to 802.11ac or slower.

Currently, the highest frequencies in use experimentally are in the range of 240GHz, where the
Fraunhofer Institute and other German researchers on the Multilink project have squeezed
40Gbps across a distance of a kilometer. They expect to use multiple channel technologies to get
that up to the terabit range, making the technology suitable to replace fiber optic links and
provide last-mile connections to homes and offices. However, unlike fiber optic links, it does go
downhill very fast in heavy rain showers. If we could use other waves to surf the internet i.e.
Data through Illumination taking the fiber out of fiber optics by sending data through an LED
light bulb that varies in intensity faster than the human eye can follow. Its the same idea behind
infrared remote controls, but far more powerful. Radio waves are just one part of the spectrum
that can carry our data. What if we could use other waves to surf the internet? One German
physicist Dr. Harald Haas, has come up with a solution he calls Data Through Illumination i.e.
taking the fiber out of fiber optics by sending data through an LED light bulb that varies in
intensity faster than the human eye can follow. Its the same idea behind infrared remote
controls, but far more powerful.
Haas says his invention, which he calls D-Light, can produce data rates faster than 10 megabits
per second, which is speedier than your average broadband connection. He envisions a future
where data for laptops, smartphones, and tablets is transmitted through the light in a room. And
security would be a snapif you cant see the light, you cant access the data. Li-Fi is a VLC,
visible light communication, technology developed by a team of scientists including Dr Gordon
Povey, Prof. Harald Haas and Dr Mostafa Afghani at the University of Edinburgh. The term LiFi was coined by Prof. Haas when he amazed people by streaming high definition video from a
standard LED lamp, at TED Global in July 2011. Li-Fi is now part of the Visible Light
Communications (VLC) PAN IEEE 802.15.7 standard.