Wi-Fi under threat from ‘100 times faster’, more secure Li-Fi | Hacker News Reader

Wi-Fi under threat from ‘100 times faster’, more secure Li-Fi

thestack.com

"The technology also promises to be more secure than ordinary Wi-Fi as the light is unable to travel through walls, meaning that connections are more secure and there is less interference between devices."

I don't understand how there could be "less interference" between devices.. Ok I get the transfer range, but how about particles in the air, birds, etc? Wouldn't packet loss be an issue here if something interrupts the stream? Unless you had multiple transmitters repeating the data...

I think it's referring to the interference between devices that happens when they are communicating via radio at the same frequency - light doesn't interact in the same way so you can have much more information transfer happening in a space and not have those light channels interfering with each other. Clearly, though the other points you put about things interrupting the light and therefore the data is an issue, but I'd imagine that the protocol has ways of mitigating that (as, I believe, networks do anyway, where a packet needs to be acknowledged or can be requested to be re-sent?)

More security through (literally) obscurity isn't exactly the best way to secure your network. Nobody will say "oh yeah, I'm sure nobody can see our Li-Fi lightbulbs so we won't put any encryption on the damn thing."--physical security is only a complement to software security.

Wi-Fi can and is plenty secure if you do it right.

I believe it when I can buy it. This is not the first time some startup (or huge, established company) announces some impressive breakthrough. And while 1GiB wireless networking would be sweet, the fact that you need a clear line of sight is problematic. In regular wifi-scenarios, a clear line of sight between access point and device is fairly rare, I think.

Still: That leaves plenty of scenarios where a high-speed wireless connection would be really sweet.

Threat? More like evolution..

I doubt I'd buy this; it won't work in the dark.

From the talk

> "you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off"

Without reducing the bitrate to compensate? That seems unlikely. Or is it using infrared?

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