UK-based researchers at the Ultra-Parallel Visible Light Communications (UP-VLC) project announce a breakthrough in visible light communications (VLC), reaching data transfer speeds of 10Gbps with a system using tiny micro-LEDs.
The researchers hail from the universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Strathclyde, Oxford and Cambridge.
Reportedly the system transmits 3.5Gbps through each of the 3 primary colours (red, green, blue) making up white light, this increasing the amount of data the light can "carry." This makes the the basis of what the researchers call light fidelity or "li-fi," a potential low-cost alternative to radio-based wireless internet.
"If you think of a shower head separating water out into parallel streams, that's how we can make light behave," Prof Harald Haas tells the BBC.
Allowing the micro-LEDs to handle millions of light intensity changes per second is Orthogonal Frequency Divisional Multiplexing (OFDM), a dgital modulation technique making what amounts to an extremely fast on/off switch.