Professor: LED lamps get the same processing power as smartphones now

LED lamps in the house will in the future have the same processing power at their disposal as smartphones now have. That is the claim of professor Harald Haas, who is researching LIFI, an internet connection that works via pulses of light.

According to Haas, LEDs will in the future undergo the same development as mobile phones, which evolved from devices for calling to devices with many more functionalities. That is what the German professor Haas, who works in Great Britain, says in an interview with IEEE. The professor does not state what functions LEDs would have, in addition to those of receiver and transmitter of internet signals. Philips, among others, had previously experimented with a system for position determination in shops based on LED lamps.

Haas is researching LIFI, a technology for transmitting internet signals over a short distance by means of light pulses over high frequencies. With existing red, green and blue LEDs, his research team achieved speeds of 100Mbit/s, but by means of modified LEDs and systems, LiFi should be able to transfer signals at 15Gbit/s in the future. An advantage over Wi-Fi would be the lower latency, while a disadvantage is that two points must be able to ‘see’ each other: the signal cannot go through walls.

The research into LiFi has been going on for years. There seems to be a chance that the telecom authority will include ITU LiFi as a 5G standard. The current expectation is that 5g will consist of a mix of technologies that can work together on a network; Lifi can provide internet connections over short distances.