Li Fi
A quick look into Li-Fi the next-gen Wi-Fi.
Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) is a bidirectional, high-speed and fully networked wireless communication technology similar to Wi-Fi. The term was coined by Harald Haas and is a form of visible light communication and a subset of optical wireless communications (OWC) and could be a complement to RF communication (Wi-Fi or cellular networks), or even a replacement in contexts of data broadcasting. It is so far measured to be about 100 times faster than some Wi-Fi implementations, reaching speeds of 224 gigabits per second. ( Source: Wikipedia )
I assume most of you have already heard of Li-Fi, here are some facts about Li-Fi
Li-Fi transfers data using light waves from special LED bulbs. It's much faster than Wi-Fi speeds. Li-Fi works on wireless protocols like Wi-Fi’s 802.11
Li-Fi will also require a new piece of hardware in your devices whether it's a smartphone, tablet, or laptop: a photo-sensor, a sensor which reads incoming light and translates it to data.
A demonstration of Li-Fi:
Li-Fi technology is still in it's infancy stage, a wide market roll out is not expected for a few years, however, this tech is expected to be the next multi billion industry.
For someone who made his PhD in communications engineering, the use of some terms is a little "weird":
The speed of communications is always the speed of light (in the used medium, e.g. air)
The bandwidth usually refers to a spectral bandwidth and is denoted in Hertz .. e.g. MegaHertz, GHz .. etc.
The data rate is what has the unit bit per second .. or bps .. e.g. Gigabit per second
Also, claiming that they can manage to do 224 gigabits per second without stating how much bandwidth they need to use is bad marketing. They trick people into thinking this is possible in real-world scenarios where every Hertz of bandwidth is sold for a lot of $$$$. For instance, the UMTS licenses in Germany (a couple houndred MegaHertz) have brought 50 BILLION Euro.
Hence, If they wanted to use that amount of data rate, they would probably need to use alot of bandwidth. Some of the available bandwidth might be "free to use" .. but the end result is only that it interferes with already existing wireless communications devices .. at least in the short-range.
I'd rather see public meshnets more commonplace that are "off-grid" and separate from the internet.