Harald Haas: Forget Wi-Fi. Meet the new Li-Fi Internet-1

Harald Haas: Forget Wi-Fi. Meet the new Li-Fi Internet-1

I would like to demonstrate for the first time in public that it is possible to transmit a video from a standard off-the-shelf LED lamp to a solar cell with a laptop acting as a receiver. There is no Wi-Fi involved, it's just light.

And you may wonder, what's the point? And the point is this: There will be a massive extension of the Internet to close the digital divide, and also to allow for what we call "The Internet of Things" -- tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet.

In my view, such an extension of the Internet can only work if it's almost energy-neutral. This means we need to use existing infrastructure as much as possible. And this is where the solar cell and the LED come in.

I demonstrated for the first time, at TED in 2011, Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity. Li-Fi uses off-the-shelf LEDs to transmit data incredibly fast, and also in a safe and secure manner. Data is transported by the light, encoded in subtle changes of the brightness. If we look around, we have many LEDs around us, so there's a rich infrastructure of Li-Fi transmitters around us. But so far, we have been using special devices -- small photo detectors, to receive the information encoded in the data. I wanted to find a way to also use existing infrastructure to receive data from our Li-Fi lights. And this is why I have been looking into solar cells and solar panels.

A solar cell absorbs light and converts it into electrical energy. This is why we can use a solar cell to charge our mobile phone. But now we need to remember that the data is encoded in subtle changes of the brightness of the LED, so if the incoming light fluctuates, so does the energy harvested from the solar cell. This means we have a principal mechanism in place to receive information from the light and by the solar cell, because the fluctuations of the energy harvested correspond to the data transmitted.

Of course the question is: can we receive very fast and subtle changes of the brightness, such as the ones transmitted by our LED lights? And the answer to that is yes, we can. We have shown in the lab that we can receive up to 50 megabytes per second from a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell. And this is faster than most broadband connections these days.

Now let me show you in practice. In this box is a standard, off-the-shelf LED lamp. This is a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell; it is connected to the laptop. And also we have an instrument here to visualize the energy we harvest from the solar cell. And this instrument shows something at the moment. This is because the solar cell already harvests light from the ambient light.

Om Namah Shivay