This technology is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi - Ellopia Press

A new technology, known as Li-Fi, could one day offer internet speeds one hundred times faster than the Wi-Fi we use today. Scientists have achieved speeds in the lab of up to 224 GB per second. That’s the equivalent of downloading 18 movies in the blink of an eye. Li-Fi, or light fidelity, is now moving to trials in the real world, with office tests in Tallin, Estonia achieving speeds of 1 GB per second, 100 times the speed of traditional Wi-Fi.
The limits of Wi-Fi
For those who remember 56k modems, Wi-Fi feels like a rapid and liberating way to access the internet. Continuing to use Wi-Fi as a means to transmit data, however, has a number of challenges. As Harald Haas explains in the video below, the world’s ever-growing desire for more data at faster rates is pushing Wi-Fi’s capacity to its limits. Wi-Fi is achieved by transmitting data through radio waves, but can only transfer so much at a time. By 2019, it is estimated that the world will be exchanging roughly 35 quintillion bytes of information each month. Because radio frequencies are already in use and heavily regulated, that data is going to struggle to find a spot in line. Wi-Fi is simply running out of space.
Capacity is only part of the problem. Wi-Fi is not a terribly efficient solution. The base stations responsible for transmitting radio waves only function at about 5% efficiency, most of the energy being used to cool the stations. For those transmitting sensitive data, security is also a problem, as radio waves travel through solid objects such as walls and doors.