We’ve known for over a decade that blinking light bulbs can transfer substantial quantities of wireless data, not just dumb infrared commands to your TV. Now, the IEEE standards body behind Wi-Fi has decided to formally invite “Li-Fi” to the same table — with speeds of between 10 megabits per second and 9.6 gigabits per second using invisible infrared light.
As of June 2023, the IEEE 802.11 wireless standard now officially recognizes wireless light communications as a physical layer for wireless local area networks, which is a fancy way of saying that that Li-Fi doesn’t need to compete with Wi-Fi. Light can be just another kind of access point and interface delivering the same networks and/or the same internet to your device.
In fact,...