There seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation going around about LiFi recently. It's not entirely your fault, most reporting on the technology is inept at best. That video you cite is also full of misinformation.
Scarred Sword Heart
Currently, wireless Internet (wifi, 3G, 4G) is delivered via radio waves.
Correct.
Scarred Sword Heart
This is generally fine, but is subject to slowdown as more and more people use it.
It's not that the radio waves themselves will slow down at all. It's just that there is a limited amount of bandwidth with a limited maximum capacity. As more users are competing for that limited capacity each user will receive a smaller slice.
Scarred Sword Heart
What's needed is a faster medium to transmit data wirelessly.
Faster medium isn't necessarily the solution. As I previously explained, the problem isn't speed but congestion.
Scarred Sword Heart
That faster medium may be lifi or light fidelity.
It almost certainly won't.
Scarred Sword Heart
Since we see lightning before thunder, we know light travels faster than sound.
Correct. It's well documented that the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound.
Scarred Sword Heart
Thus, data carried over light waves emitted from pulsing LEDs will arrive faster than data carried by radio waves.
Incorrect. Radio waves are NOT sound waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation. You know what else is electromagnetic radiation? Light.
Light is just a very narrow spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Light is exactly the same thing as radio waves. They travel at exactly the same speed.
Scarred Sword Heart
Hopefully within the next ten years, this will become the new reality.
I don't know about "hopefully". LiFi is an interesting approach to solving some of the existing problems with wireless data distribution, however it also comes with plenty of its own weaknesses as well.
Using light to transmit data is not new, in fact it's very old. Before we had discovered radio waves or even developed the telegraph people were communicating over long distances using signal fires. Even in our recent history, one of the first wireless data technologies we developed was Infrared (IR). This is the same technology that is still used in most TV remote controls. Many portable computing devices from the 90s (such as early laptops and PDAs) used Infrared transmitters and receivers to exchange data wirelessly. As you may have noticed, modern laptops and portable devices have since abandoned the use of IR transceivers.
IR was all but abandoned because it was inefficient, slow, and required direct line of sight (meaning you had to align both devices and then not move them while they were exchanging data).
The development of LiFi aims to improve the speed and slightly improve the line-of-sight problem by applying some of the modern signaling techniques we have perfected with radio transceivers. However it will still rely pretty heavily on line-of-sight and be inefficient compared to other radio frequencies.
LiFi is not a silver-bullet for the future of networking. More likely it will be a niche technology for extremely local area networking (much like ZigBee, Bluetooth, and NFC).
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