Wireless Internet Access Uses Visible Light, Not Radio Waves 264
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the no-tin-foil-hats-required dept.
from the no-tin-foil-hats-required dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a company has demonstrated a new form of wireless communication that uses light instead of radio waves. "Its inventor, St. Cloud resident John Pederson, says visible-light embedded wireless data communication is the next step in the evolution of wireless communications, one that will expand the possibilities in phone and computer use. The connection provides Web access with almost no wiring, better security and with speeds more than eight times faster than cable."
light hax (Score:4, Funny)
im in ur bawx stealin ur photons
You're right beside me? (Score:3, Funny)
"Because light does not travel through walls, cell phones and government and banking information would be more secure."
It's not a bug, it's a feature, really - it is, please believe me.
Re:You're right beside me? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You're right beside me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You're right beside me? (Score:4, Insightful)
So I'm going to lose connection every time someone stands in between me and the light emitter? And cell phones? So every time somebody walks past me while I'm on the phone I lose the signal?
We are already coming up with new ways to make fiber cheaper and with this stuff you'd still need fiber because you aren't going to get great distances with it. Not to mention the billions it would take to install this thing along the roadways so it could work as a cell phone. Maybe in small indoor areas it might be decent, but if I am in a small area there is already gigabit and fiber. So to me this seems like a solution with more problems than the tech they want to replace. No thanks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't RTFA, but if the system were based on diffuse, ambient light in the room, then that shouldn't be a problem.
I swear that I remember a similar idea from around 10 years ago where they wanted to use fluorescent lights in much the same way ... switch them on and off thousands of times per second and you could use them as a data channel if your device had an optical sensor. By setting the hi and low thresholds
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Well now, that depends on both the wall and the light source. No one has said what wavelength of light is being used, at what power, and what frequency/modulation. While I'm sure his setup goes well beyond IRDA, using LEDs ("light") for data transmissions has been around for over 20 years. Both my cellphone and laptop have IR ports on them -- even used it for internet access once. (laptop doesn't have bluetooth and I don't have the 150$ (f*** you Ericson) USB cable for the phone.)
[Back in college, eons a
But... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
They're both part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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Where and when are microwaves or radio waves commonly referred to as light?
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
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Wherever photons = light?
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Do they all contain photons?
Yes, but I'd recommend not using the word "contain".
Do other wavelengths have other "particles"?
No.
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I think you mean both radio and light are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. "Light" is almost always used to refer exclusively to the visible (and near-visible [IR, UV]) portion of the EM spectrum.
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
"Light" is almost always used to refer exclusively to the visible (and near-visible [IR, UV]) portion of the EM spectrum.
Well, to be pedantic, scientists often use "light" to refer to higher energy radiation too. It's not commonly used for wavelengths longer than far IR, but it is commonly used for X-ray and even extremely short wavelengths - like "synchrotron light".
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
Come on!
Yes it says "light" in the title and ScuttleMonkey-added text. The very first sentence of the actual user submission specifies "visible light". Once that context is established, "light" is a perfectly valid shorthand way to refer to it, and is often (though admittedly not always) used in that way.
Radio waves... (Score:2, Funny)
... are light, you insensitive clod!
Next step?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Next step?? (Score:4, Informative)
Visible light doesn't, probably. But "light" is a term that can be used to refer to the whole of the EM spectrum.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So if you ask someone to "turn on the light," what are you referring to? The radio? ;)
When pitting "light" against "radio" waves, the implication seems to be plain that he's talking about visible light.
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but the article is about transmission with visible light and this discussion has already been had in the thread above.
so quit being pedantic and either tell us why this is better or admit that it's worse
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Visible light doesn't, probably. But "light" is a term that can be used to refer to the whole of the EM spectrum.
Wow. I wish I was so smart that I found the use of that term confusing.
Re:Next step?? (Score:5, Interesting)
The other article (not sure if this one does didn't read it) indicated that this technology could be incorporated into LED lighting. Basically your overhead lighting would become the access point. There would be recievers in the room as well that would pick up your transmissions and presumably put them on some sort of physical media (cat6, fibre). Pretty neat, but to me sound extremely finicky.
-- Snow.
Re:Next step?? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Next step?? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but it would be easy to gain unauthorized access to your wireless network if you have windows.
Why does that sound familiar?
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Ever hear of a Faraday cage? It's not that hard to install one in the walls of a building if you want to block incoming/outgoing signals. You can even just do them to specific rooms or portions if you like.
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Not hard?
I rather suspect you have never installed let alone retro fitted a cage. EMF leaks everywhere, replace all windows with metaled glass, all doors need to be backed up, any vents need mesh, plastic pipes etc etc etc.
It's a nightmare which is why emf shielded buildings are usually built to spec by specialists.
Re:Next step?? (Score:5, Funny)
Great, now I can watch the girl next door change AND leech her wireless with my telescope.
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http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/09/1843247 [slashdot.org]
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Well they certainly aren't very heavy...
Warning! (Score:5, Funny)
Looking at the access point can cause severe retinal burns. We are not responsible for retinal damage or permanent blindness as a result of using our product. Thank you, and have a nice day.
Re:Warning! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but retinal damage only occurs when using P2P protocols to share pr0n according to this flashy brochure the preacher man gave me.
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Who needs a computer? Just stare at the AP and directly view your porn. Hairy palms AND burned retinas, yay! My grandmother always said doing 'that' would make me go blind!
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In other news... (Score:2)
WARNING! (Score:5, Funny)
WARNING!
Do not look at the internet with your remaining eye.
Re:WARNING! (Score:5, Funny)
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That didn't bother me too much. But I disconnected the Internet from my house for a month after 2 girls and a cup! Just thinking about that still makes me want to vomit.
huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Radio is just another color of light--a very, uh, extremely red color.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it seems like they're drawing a couple suspect distinctions in this article. They talk about "light" as being very different from "radio" even though they're both EM radiation, and they talk about "using light" as very different from "using fiber optics", even though it's really just a difference of medium.
I don't really see it working out. We already use that portion of the EM spectrum for... you know... seeing. I guess you could claim that being easily blocked (e.g. by walls) is an advantage, but for most people in most circumstances, being able to pass through lots of materials would be a greater advantage. If you really want tighter security, then instead of relying on walls to block the signal, this technology could be improved by creating some sort of conduit that would go directly from one point to another. Like some kind of fibrous, wiry, cable-like structure between them. I'm sure that would be much better than fiber optics.
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They talk about "light" as being very different from "radio" even though they're both EM radiation, and they talk about "using light" as very different from "using fiber optics", even though it's really just a difference of medium.
Technically, you are correct that light is light (be it radio or visible or ultraviolet or whatever) and that, at least in the simplest terms, the only difference between fiber optics and open air light communication. However, the technical difficulties involved in using visible light in communication vs radio waves are incredible. Nobody has done it before and the reason is because it is HARD.
The very reason fiber optics exist is to overcome the challenges of using visible light as communication. Becaus
Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
This is where you are wrong, sir. And you can test it yourself. Create an HTML document and set the background color past "#FF0000". Crank it up to "#ZZ0000" and your monitor will then begin blasting radio waves at your face.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
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that's a crazy and horribly intriguing idea.
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It's called free space optics (Score:5, Informative)
I remember playing a Starcraft game with an iMac G3 and PowerBook G3. A friend and I used AppleTalk over IrDA. Unfortunately it was rather awkward since they had to line up, but we figured out you could bounce the infrared beam with mirrors. So we didn't need ethernet, we could play wirelessly...this was in 1998, long before 802.11b became mass-market.
The article is even more amusing than that. (Score:3, Interesting)
From TFA:
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Uhhhh...radio waves propagate at the speed of light too, being made out of light and all.
However, higher-energy light has a higher frequency. Higher frequency = higher bandwidth. (and, not-so-coincidentally, higher power consumption)
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There are radio waves above "light" and below "light" on the spectrum. It's just a matter of how fast you shake your electrons.
And the real genius of fiber right now is being able to multiplex sub-frequency lamdas thru a single fiber. Not simply increasing the freq. indefinitely.
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There are certainly photons "above light" in the spectrum, but we don't call them radio. Radio waves are below Microwaves, which are below IR, which is below visible. Above visible, you get UV, X Rays, and Gamma Rays. X and Gamma
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Re:It's called free space optics (Score:5, Interesting)
And here is GPL'd design: http://ronja.twibright.com/ [twibright.com]
8x faster than cable (Score:2)
Means little, when the current cable speeds can basically be infinite. You know how you have all those TV channels traveling through the same wire? They can do the same with the internet communications as well-- just use multiple channels in parallel.
8-channel cable DOCSIS spec [wikipedia.org]
Or maybe they aren't talking about cable-internet specifically; I only skimmed TA :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If it works out as Pederson plans, his project would replace the need for fiber optic wires that run underground and in buildings. The cost savings alone in construction and wiring make it impressive, St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis said.
âoeRight now, we are going through a tremendous amount of fiber optics. If this can move and transmit with light rather than cable, there is significant savings in that alone,â Kleis said.
Now, given that they're essentially the same technology, I can't see how this would be faster than fiber. But if by "cable" when talking about speeds, he does mean DOCSIS, then that's easy. 10 Gigabit ethernet is already more than 20 times faster than EuroDOCSIS 3.0, 8-channel, and most varieties of 10GbE run over fiber.
oldnews (Score:4, Informative)
Light, huh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Has this guy never seen snow? Or fog? Or rain? Does he live in a desert? Two words: Atmospheric absorption.
Re: (Score:2)
Two words: error correction!
Semi-kidding.
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Considering that St. Cloud is in Minnesota, it is very likely he has seen all of those things.
This product would be tailored to applications inside buildings, where those things don't happen too frequently. This technology is perfect for security type applications.
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Thermal weapon sights and FLIR systems see thru fog, rain, and snow quite well. If the wavelength is smaller than the particle it's going around, you don't see it.
All media have distortion and absorption problem, it's up to the protocol layers to deal with that. The mufuckin microwave slows your 802.11 throughput...
Now I guess we need ... (Score:5, Funny)
Tinfoil glasses :)
IR networking (Score:2)
He needs to think twice (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a reason we don't already use visible light signals to send wireless data (except if we're lost in the wilderness, I guess). It's VISIBLE. Can you image how annoying it would be to have light flickering around you all the time from your communicating devices? One of the primary advantages of the various bands we use (radio, infrared, etc.) is that they don't interfere with our normal operations: they're invisible.
We've got plenty of bandwidth that doesn't interact directly with the human body. Why d
Re:He needs to think twice (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you image how annoying it would be to have light flickering around you all the time from your communicating devices?
You know that thing you looked into when you typed your message. Be it a CRT, LCD or Plasma, it flickers at 40-120 times per second.
Communication applications would flicker even faster to the point you wouldn't notice unless you sent a constant string of 0's or 1's.
Don't get me wrong, I still think it's a bad idea for line of sight and other interference reasons, but flicker is near the bottom of that list.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they don't do a true flicker 40-120 times per second, unless you are actually showing alternate frames of black and white. CRT phosphor material glows for a range of time (optimally equal to the reciprocal of the refresh rate). LCDs don't flicker at all, unless you count the dithering of cheap lower-color panels, which isn't much luminance change anyway. I'm not familiar enough with plasma tech to know, but I haven't noticed any flickering on those displays.
Now, a DLP projector with color wheel IS re
Re:He needs to think twice (Score:5, Funny)
Can you image how annoying it would be to have light flickering around you all the time from your communicating devices?
Oh, cut the bleeding heart crap, will ya? We all have our switches, lights, and knobs to deal with. At this very moment I surrounded by hundreds of thousands of blinking and beeping lights, blinking and beeping and flashing and flashing and I can't take it anymore! They're blinking and beeping and flashing! Why can't anyone stop it? Why doesn't someone pull the plug?!
Warm air bends light (Score:2)
Andy Tanenbaum has a nice story about that. On a conference they wanted to use a modulated laser to beam an internet connection to another building. Except they calibrated the target at night, it tested fine. But during the day the air would warm and break the connection. He found it rather odd they didn't just use a cable the next day, but the management insisted on using the broken technology. Didn't work they entire conference.
Been tried, won't work (Score:4, Informative)
It's been investigated but the technology just won't work out. Light sensors have a strong speed/intensity tradeoff. Even with a several-inch wide lens you can't collect enough light to drive a sensor at more than a few kilobits/sec. And people hate to keep pointing the sensor at the opposite party.
And if the room has LED or CCFL lighting the interference from those is mighty intense.
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Free space optic might be a solution to wireless HDMI. Put an LED light in the room and modulate it in the Mhz range. Humans will never notice.
Of course I've never understood why people want wireless HDMI. You still have to wire power to the monitor.
Does Double Duty... (Score:2)
To paraphrase Sun....The Network is the Smoke Detector.
bad summary (Score:2)
Correction: ..."
"An marketing drone writes to tell us that his company has demonstrated a
There, fixed for ya ;)
Re:bad comment (Score:2)
Correction: ..."
;)
"An marketing drone writes to tell us that his company has demonstrated a
There, fixed for ya
Correction: ..."
;)
"A marketing drone writes to tell us that his company has demonstrated a
There, fixed for ya
"inventor" (Score:2)
My foot, people were doing this decades ago in the analog world.
If you include fiber.. its digital too.
Ronja (Score:2)
I recall hearing about Ronja [twibright.com] on /. years ago, and they have deployed it for a wireless net.
Strange comment... (Score:2)
From TFA:
Quite apart from the fact the country isn't explicitly mentioned in TFA (I assume it's the USA), why would someone say this? Not good for humanity, or for the communications or IT industries, but good for a specific country? Strange.
This has been around a long time. (Score:5, Informative)
1.) There is TCP/IP over Infrared (IrDA) and comes standard on Windows and works also in Linux.
http://web.pdx.edu/~mendyke/ip7780.html [pdx.edu]
2.) there are many laser link systems out there.
I even worked on one.
http://www.dnull.com/zebraresearch/company-mail.html [dnull.com]
3.) The 802.11 standard also includes the 802.11 Infrared (IR) Physical Layer. 802.11 IR defines 1Mbps and 2Mbps operation by bouncing light off ceilings and walls to provide connectivity within a room or small office. This infrared version of the standard has been available since the initial release of the 802.11 standard in 1997.
4.) Spectrix Corporation of Mundelein, Illinois had a proprietary solution for this. I think they are out of business now.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QZrrXcs1R9gC&pg=RA1-PA207&lpg=RA1-PA207&dq=%22Spectrix+Corporation+%22&source=bl&ots=kMxMofcTd7&sig=qd4QvwoREWQloJKwnpmp63j-Z-I&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result [google.com]
If you explore the link above from the book "Wireless Computing" By Ira Brodsky Published by John Wiley and Sons, 1997. This book goes in a lot of detail about many IP over optical solutions available at that time.
Utter bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is utter bullshit.
Using light, as opposed to radio waves is NOT more secure, unless the room has no windows, or others areas for light to escape.
Wiring a room to support it could easily cost $300 (you still need atleast one network drop to the room, and mount the transmitter).
Are there environments where the slight advantages it has may be worth it? sure. but they will be so rare that the cost of the device will stay quite high.
THe article looks like a puff piece designed to lure in investors.
Light = Radio waves (RF) (Score:2)
I hate stories like this. It suggests that "light" is somehow different than "radio waves". They're the same thing, the difference is that we can see in that portion of the spectrum.
Available since the mid-1990s from HP (Score:4, Informative)
1996 called. It wants its HP NetBeamIR Infrared Ethernet Access Point [shopping.com] back.
IR access points have been around for years, and they work OK. They can even be made to work through diffuse reflections, so you don't have to have a clear line of sight. But you need a lot of access points to cover a space.
Not The Only Developer (Score:2, Informative)
I particularly like their plans for use in cars. I can imagine combining this with nano piezoelectric [sciencedaily.com] technology to create roadways that use passing car vibrations to power illuminated markings that can also transmit road condition information to passing cars or link their light-based inter-car networks around corners and over hills.
The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades that decode and display ambient porn...
Call me naive (Score:2)
But won't this require prefect line-of-sight to have any hope of working?
I'm imagining something like a TV remote, or those IRda systems PDAs and printers used to have but, since it's in the visible band of the spectrum, with more line-of-sight problems. I don't see anything like that replacing 2.4GHz wireless any time soon.
FSO has been around along time (Score:2)
see: http://www.lightpointe.com/home.cfm [lightpointe.com]
You're just being annoying. (Score:2)
Light is part of the RF spectrum... just a particular part that the human eye can see. So is heat. We don't use these sections because they're very annoying to humans to have fluctuating seemingly randomly for transfer of data.
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In my timezone it's only 4:30 you insensitive clod!
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Yeah I heard you can only use it during the day. Of course that means it is pretty much useless in areas that get dark at 5pm in the winter. Though it could be a great tie in for the Zork browser MMO. If you don't get your character someplace safe before night when your internet cuts out you end up getting eaten by a grue.
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What happens when it rains?
I think rain is wet, but then I think that fish is nice, so who am I to judge?
Re: (Score:2)
What happens when it rains?
I think rain is wet, but then I think that fish is nice, so who am I to judge?
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The only plausible reason I can think of is that it doesn't need to be licensed from the FCC. The US government has stolen it's citizens' rightful property and has sold off the more useful parts of the spectrum to the highest bidder. All they let the average guy used for unlicensed wifi and the like is the spectrum no one else wants, such as 2.4 Ghz. Not that using light would be much better.