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

BrikoX@lemmy.zip to Technology@lemmy.ml – 25 points –
Light-based “LiFi” is stunningly fast, notably fragile—and now standardized
arstechnica.com
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At this point it’s like, why not use Ethernet?

Here’s the first two scenarios that come to mind, if/when the price becomes reasonable.

  1. In a typical cube farm, you could string up a very small number of these in the drop ceiling and have Ethernet level speeds without having to run cables to every single desk. It should be a much easier install.

  2. At home, I could run an drop for these through my attic to the one or two rooms where I use a lot of bandwidth, eg my home office and living room. Again, an easier install than running Ethernet through the ceiling, down the walls and to every piece of equipment in those rooms.

For most people I’m not sure if it would be worth it, but I could certainly see it in those niches.

Another use case is this being deployed in addition to WiFi. You could cover office area with this and have client devices use faster connection most of the time while transparently dropping to wifi speeds when lifi connection is interrupted. It would give users faster speed and it would also improve situation for wifi only devices as the frequency would be much less congested.

Oy definitely, I can see a box that is a combo LiFi/WiFi access point with a single ethernet/fiber optic cable running to it providing the best network available for each device becoming a standard ceiling fixture in offices and tech forward homes.