I like statistics. Sometimes it can be misleading or data can be hard to interpret. But it can help us when we struggle to see the forest for the trees.
The last two years the IP-based mobile technologies were booming. If you are working with 4G networks you know it well. This year however the number of new deployments decreased significantly (Sep 2017, source GSMA).
IP Deployments Sep-17
Well, there can be many reasons for that. Rather than guessing, let’s have a fun and take a look on how popular are some telco topics on Google in the last 3 years.
Do you switch-off your smartphone or wifi, when you go to sleep? Many people do. I’m not going to discuss if the waves have any real effect on our health or psyche. But undoubtedly in the industry with more and more active devices we have to think about possible interference. Especially in the electromagnetic sensitive areas such as in aircrafts, hospitals or chemical plants.
Fortunately there is a new technology which doesn’t utilize the radio waves but still belongs to the same standard family 802.11 as Wi-Fi. Li-Fi is a bidirectional, high speed and fully wireless communication technology, that uses light from light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a medium. The visible light spectrum is 10,000 times larger than the entire radio frequency spectrum. On the other hand the light waves cannot penetrate walls which makes a much shorter range. Still the direct line of sight isn’t a must. A light reflected off the walls can achieve 70 Mbit/s!
So what is the real data rate? The Estonian Velmenni startup just announced that they are able to send data at up to 1GBps. That means 100-times faster than via Wi-Fi. As the British scientists have even reached the data rates of over 10 Gbit/s, which is more than 250 times faster than current broadband, we can expect further improvements in the future.
Real Time Communication 