Harald Haas wants the world to use light to transmit data. His latest demonstration was at TEDGlobal in London during September 2015. We’ve covered Haas and his work before but he’s moved the technology forward in this latest talk, A breakthrough new kind of wireless internet.
Haas is trying to solve a two headed problem. First, he says that 4.3 billion people don’t have any access to the internet, and this digital divide is slowing development in the world. His other concern is our growing reliance on data, and the estimate that 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020, requiring the equivalent of one hundred nuclear power plants. The only way we can handle this load is for data transmission to be energy neutral.
Using a solar cell and LED lights, data is recorded by the light and encoded by changing the brightness of the light. Haas says that data can be transported quickly and securely. Previous demonstrations were done using photodetectors to receive the data, but photovoltaic cells are now being used as inputs. Lab tests have shown up to 50 MB per second being sent through a solar cell.
Harald Haas is a great speaker able to communicate highly complex data and concepts at an easy level of abstraction. The demonstration shows a standard LED lamp, a solar cell, and an energy meter to show the level of data being processed. A video of clouds flowing lazily across the screen is shown to play when the lamp is turned on and then pause when the solar module is blocked.
Haas has been working on lifi for over a decade and built a great body of publications around his work, the first in 2006. Another recent talk was done at IEEE’s GreenComm 2015, focusing more on denser technical aspects of lifi. This is a true moonshot scale project, so much that it’s almost frustrating that progress takes so long and requires such massive amounts of effort. The leap here is that solar cells are now able to receive and transmit data while continuing to convert light to energy.