TAG | li-fi
Continued testing on LiFi capabilities are in train prior to a long-anticipated roll-out of the system in Paris Metro stations.
A French firm has won the contract to supply internet-over-lighting technology on the Paris Metro.
The ambitious project – which will allow over two million daily commuters to use lights as a form of Wi-fi, dubbed ‘Li-fi’ – now looks firmly on track. Already La Defense station has been successfully equipped with the tech.
Paris-based Oledcomm, a spin-off of the University of Versailles, won the contract from RAPT to initially supply Li-fi installations in 66 stations across Paris, involving over 250,000 LED luminaires.
The award of the contract by RATP follows an extensive series of test phases before the roll-out goes ahead. The first phase of the work involved a series of evaluations to prove the concept. This work was done in a so-called Fab Lab environment, community-based workshops where entrepreneurs, students, small businesses come together to develop technology.
The system needed to demonstrate that it could deliver on its core promises of a Li-fi installation, especially on four key criteria:
- The Li-fi can operate within a complex physical environment
- The system can provide the bi-directional communications needed for a secure internet connection
- Traffic and security information can be ‘pushed’ to smart phones as necessary
- A system of audio-messaging could be developed to enable tourists and people with impaired sight to be guided around the tunnels and concourses of an underground station
The Fab Lab process also presented commercial opportunities to other entrepreneurial groups to use the open-source nature of the system to develop apps that could work alongside the core Li-fi service.
Having successfully completed the test-house phase, the next phase of the contract moved into the real world with an installation of Li-fi-enabled LED luminaires at the Metro station at La Defense.
Chosen for its complexity, La Defense provides all of the real-life difficulties that a Li-fi installation will need to overcome if it’s to prove its worth to the transport system operators.
Once all of the testing has been successfully completed and RATP is confident of the platform, it’s expected that Paris will become the first public transportation system in world with Li-fi connectivity.
Oledcomm, formed in in 2005, installed its first public Li-fi project at the Musee Curtius in Liege in 2012. Since then, the company has gone on to install systems in offices, hospitals, retail stores as well as public street lighting.
Li-fi works by making invisible modulations to the light from a luminaire – invisible to the human eye, but not to the camera on a smartphone, tablet or laptop. The same technology lies behind the positioning systems being used by retailers such as Carrefour and Target, but here it is being used to send data, rather than just to pinpoint someone’s position. Proponents of Li-fi say that it will add enormous capacity to wireless communications, because the visible light spectrum is 10,000 times larger than the radio frequency spectrum that Wi-fi uses. Some also note that it will operate much faster than Wi-fi, and that it will be useful in electromagnetic sensitive areas like hospital, airplanes and nuclear power plants.
It’s currently not clear how devices will communicate back to the lighting on the Paris Metro installation. However, it is relatively straightforward to use different wavelengths for each link direction, i.e., visible light in the downlink (to also serve as illumination) and infrared or even standard Wi-fi in the uplink.
On the downside, Li-Fi signals do not travel as far as Wi-Fi signals do.
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Apple looks set to include a li-fi capability in future versions of the iPhone, meaning it can access high-speed data using lighting.
The backing of a tech giant like Apple would transform the technology from scientific curiousity into a mainstream technique for accessing the internet, and provide a huge boost to the lighting industry.
The iPhone’s operating system now openly references li-fi capability in its programming code.
Li-fi uses modulated visible light from LEDs to transmit data to enabled devices. It’s invisible to the human eye, and is much faster than traditional wifi.
Apple already holds a patent on using its camera to capture data as well as images, so the company is well placed to exploit the new technology.
It’s not the first time this year that Apple has been making news in the lighting industry.
Last month the company added a blue-light reduction feature into an update to its operating system in what was widely seen as the the first acknowledgement by a major manufacturer that blue light can be a health hazard.
In January Apple received its first ever patent for a lighting system, in a move that has again raised the issue of the company’s intentions in the lighting market.
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Tech start-up company Velmenni has used Li-Fi-enabled lamps to transmit data at speeds of 1Gbps. Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of up to 224Gbps.
The company tested the method of delivering data, which uses the visible spectrum rather than radio waves, in a working office.
The visible light spectrum is 10,000 times greater than the RF spectrum used in Wi-Fi, and Li-Fi can achieve about 1000 times the data density of Wi-Fi because visible light can be well contained in a tight illumination area, whereas RF tends to spread out and cause interference.
Velmenni tested the technology in an office in Tallinn, Estonia, to allow workers to access the internet and in an industrial space, where it provided a smart lighting solution.
Speaking to the International Business Times, chief executive Deepak Solanki said that the technology could reach consumers “within three to four years”.
The term Li-Fi was coined by Professor Harald Haas, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Edinburgh-based pureLiFi. He demonstrated the technology at a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in 2011.
His talk, which has now been watched nearly two million times, showed an LED lamp streaming video. Professor Haas described a future when billions of light bulbs could become wireless hotspots.
One of the big advantages of Li-Fi is the fact that, unlike Wi-Fi, it does not interfere with other radio signals, so could be utilised on aircraft and in other places where interference is an issue.
But the technology also has its drawbacks – most notably the fact that it cannot be deployed outdoors in direct sunlight, because that would interfere with its signal.
Neither can the technology travel through walls so initial use is likely to be limited to places where it can be used to supplement Wi-Fi networks, such as in congested urban areas or places where Wi-Fi is limited, such as hospitals.
pureLiFi, established in 2012 as a spin-off from the University of Edinburgh, where its research has been in development since 2008, demonstrated a commercial Li-Fi network system, Li-Flame, this year at a major mobile technology show in Barcelona. “This is developing very quickly – it’s just a question of maturity,” says Nikola Serafimovski, pureLiFi’s director, product marketing. “My expectation is that this will be a widespread technology in a 24-month timeframe.”
Picture: pureLiFi
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