German Scientists' Visible Light Network Hits 3Gbps 79
Mark.JUK writes "Scientists working at Berlin's Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute have developed new components that can turn standard 'off-the-shelf' LED room lights into an Optical Wireless Local Area Network (OWLAN) that delivers data transmission rates of up to 3Gbps. The new kit is an extension of HHI's earlier work, which in 2011 delivered the first 800Mbps capable network using ordinary flashing LED lights. Since then the kit has been improved to achieve a transmission rate of 1Gbps per single light frequency (basic LEDs usually use up to three light frequencies) and the operating bandwidth has been pushed to 180MHz from 30MHz."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:sounds overly optimistic (Score:5, Informative)
"Nobody uses RGB for room lighting"
You're wrong. In fact, not only can an RGB diode produce great white light, we have diode packages that can essentially cover the entire visible spectrum and thus create any CCT known with greater efficiencies than a white diode, which, again, you're wrong - it's a UV diode with a phosphor on it, not a blue diode.
Link to article (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately the press release is a little short on details. Here is the link to the actual article (paywalled):
"1.25 Gbit/s Visible Light WDM Link based on DMT Modulation of a Single RGB LED Luminary", opticsinfobase.org [opticsinfobase.org]
PARCTAB (Score:4, Informative)
The original PARCTAB, basically the first computer to roughly look and work like a modern touch screen device, used networking based on ceiling-mounted LEDs. A paper describing the system is here [psu.edu]. Many systems used IrDA communications after that. Of course, it's probably been a lot of engineering work increasing the speed of the system, but it's not a fundamentally new idea, just the evolution of old technology.