Prof Harald Haas Discusses LiFi on The Spectrum Policy Podcast 101 - Is the industry ready to see the light?
Spectrum Policy Podcast
In today’s article, we will discuss a recent Spectrum Policy podcast episode on LiFi technology.
In this episode, PolicyTracker’s Mirva Villa speaks with Professor Harald Haas, who is considered to be one of the LiFi technology’s pioneers. He explains how the technology works, and where the industry is headed and shares some interesting statements.
At LiFi Tech News, we picked and summarised some conversation points of the podcast:
Light communication like LiFi offers a huge, unregulated spectrum that can help address the spectrum crunch faced by traditional radio frequency communications. The light spectrum is 3000 times larger than the entire usable radio spectrum, providing abundant capacity.
LiFi modulates the intensity of light to encode data, which is then picked up by a photodetector and decoded. It can leverage existing lighting infrastructure like lightbulbs or streetlights to provide high-speed wireless data connectivity indoors and outdoors.
Compared to WiFi, LiFi provides more security since light doesn't penetrate opaque walls, more control over where signals go, and better energy efficiency. It's currently being used in defence applications where security is paramount.
Standards like 802.11bb enable LiFi to leverage existing WiFi chipsets and infrastructure. Having standards helps drive commercial viability and interoperability of the technology.
Key barriers are around commercial adoption and funding rather than technical feasibility. More investment and industry partners are needed to help scale up the technology and bring down costs.
LiFi has many potential use cases beyond terrestrial networks, including connecting aerial/satellite platforms, underwater sensor networks, and using solar panels for both energy and data. It can also help enable emerging technologies like AR/VR headsets that need very high bandwidth.
Overall, LiFi offers great promise as a complementary spectrum solution to RF that can enhance connectivity, capacity and efficiency. But greater commercial backing and investment is needed to realise its full potential.
Some of Professor Harald Haas’ statements from the podcast. Some of the statements have been edited by LiFi Tech News:
“We need believers and some people that really see the light and see that LiFi is not a TV remote control on steroids, we're not building a faster TV room, we're building networks, you're building mobile networks, you're building sort of the capability for people to move while they have LiFi connection.”
“So, we really want to see the people that basically can really see the light and I'm sorry for the pun, really see the opportunity to help us bring that technology to the fore. I mean, if you're talking about investments, or have between 50 and 100 million really in big volumes to really scale that technology up and that this is a drop in the ocean compared to the investments in the RF world. Right? But somehow, we need this and that shouldn't be missed. We believe in the technology and need someone who can really help us drive that breakthrough into making it scale up and bringing sort of the cost down by miniaturising and scaling up. So, that's the commercial barrier. It's access to funds.”
Image credit to pureLiFi
