The future of wireless connection will soon become bright, and based in bulbs. Whenever you use Wi-Fi to text or download a Serial podcast, the data travels over radio waves. The trouble is that these waves occupy such a narrow pathway along the electromagnetic spectrum, which limits the available bandwidth for smartphones and other devices.
“You can never create more spectrum,” says Harald Haas, a lead mobile communications researcher at the University of Edinburgh. If radio waves are like a crowded single-lane road, visible light-waves are like a wide-open freeway.
The solution for faster downloads is to take advantage of this larger swath through LED bulbs. When modified with a signal processor, the bulbs function as semiconductors, embedding digital information within light waves.
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