Lightbulb moment for visible light networking: 200 Gbps without a fibre

Even in a niche it's not viable, since the field of view would be more restricted than out in the open.

Aside from that, there will also be problems with passing co-workers, cats, butterflies, what have you. However, these problems might be mitigated by simply increasing the wattage of the laser a tad...

Re: IrDA all over again

Well yeah but I suppose it has been dead for long enough now that people forgot how utterly miserable it was compared to any proper RF or cable connection (anything else, really). Guess we're back at "point that bloody IR remote AT THE MEDIA BOX there on the left, idiot, NOT AT THE TV!!!"

Re: WIFI WTF?

unless the wall had a window :D

Re: In Ceiling

I was thinking along the same lines but even at home it would work if you have fairly high ceilings. You could have most of the AP's/hubs/whatever mounted above the doors and below the ceiling fans. The final hop to a PC's receiver might be tricky at times. Of course this is all assuming they could produce fairly inexpensive repeaters to route all this with. The other constraint is power of course. They'll have to beam power via microwave (joking).

For now it's not all the practical but I can see something like this being useful in the long term if they address the usability as much as possible. In the near term this would be great for rack to rack communications wouldn't it? Rather than have a nest of cables...

Re: In Ceiling

Li-Fi sounds fine, like the speed, but just a thought, I understand we may be talking about nano/milli-seconds here, but flashing light has been found in fluro's & older screens, causing medical issues, I wonder if they have made any in studies of it's effects in this area ..

Also, as I am pensioner, & have free time, to go mad with My PC's, they are spread out in flat, so main Internet PC is online 6 months at a time, long time to leave lights on ...

Re: What's the use case for 100 Gbps wireless?

Ok I'll down vote you. I typically throw around a couple of hundred gig to a terabyte at a time (disk images), across the network, so the ability to speed it up in any form is appreciated.

The bottle neck in my work though is the speed of hard drives that i'm sucking the data from. Can't wait till the day SSD's overtake hard disks as the main storage

Re: What's the use case for 100 Gbps wireless?

Sure its faster than any one PC will need, but if you're looking at networking, you want to share resources.

Cross-rack traffic has been mentioned. There are security applications where you might want wireless, but you want to confine it geographically. You might want to have some high-speed networking in your bedroom which doesn't involve irradiating your head while you sleep. I might not want to turn it off in the rest of the house, but a simple cover (or sweaty t-shirt) can close it down locally. The 100G engineering might pay-off with smaller capacity consumer networking.

Re: What's the use case for 100 Gbps wireless?

100 Gbps is just for the headlines. Anything that increases the real throughput in any particular situation will have its uses. 100 Gbps is only 50 Gbps duplex with only two members of a network, in optimal conditions. Real world situations might be closer to 10/20 Gbps or less. Plenty of situations where that would be nice to have.

WiFi is reaching the limits of its because of the bandwidth available at the frequencies at which it runs and contention with other networks. Research into alternatives is essential. And that is what this is: research.

Re: What's the use case for 100 Gbps wireless?

The use case is when you have several users close to each other.

Re: What's the use case for 100 Gbps wireless?

As a callow youth I used to think on the same lines. Started networking with sub-Mbps networks, where yeah, faster would be nice, through Mbps, then 4, 10, 16Mbps (spot the tech), and by the time 100Mbps appeared it was 'why would you want 100Mbps to the desktop?'. Same sort of question with 1Gbps, of course.

The answer is generally that most people, to begin with, don't need the higher bandwidth. But eventually, the ability to push high-bandwidth stuff around means apps appear which do exactly that. Then there's a killer (or at least ubiquitous) app that everybody uses and suddenly the big bandwidth connections start making sense.

Actually, I suspect what makes more of a difference is not so much the bandwidth as the improvements in stuff like latency, which tends to make the 'feel' of things that bit nicer. Kind of an intangible for most end users. Add in rapidly falling cost and a decent bit of backwards compatibility and it's just easier to put the new stuff in. As I think others have pointed out, the headline speed is more of a hook for marketing; fairly pointless unless you also develop the techniques to exploit it fully.

These days, I try not to think in terms of "what's the current use case?". If I can get the tech at a sensible price, the use case will probably turn up in due course, In the meantime, if all the extra tweaks improve my current usage, then that's a bonus to me.

Re: I can see it now...

The thing is, I think that's a good idea and I would consider buying those curtains from you! But how many people do you know who have aluminium foil in their wallpaper and wire mesh on their curtains to keep the WiFi signal from escaping their home?

Re: I can see it now...

Wouldn't a blindfold be easier ? Maybe more dangerous, but ...

Re: Stop or you'll go blind

Any laser system worth its salt can just up the power and burn through the fog and rain can't it?