pureLiFi, an Edinburg University spin-off co-founded by Prof. Harald Haas, plans to launch its latest LiFi product, at Mobile World Congress 2016. Over the last several years, Haas has made bold forecasts about the future of light communication technology and the lighting industry’s role in that future. Haas co-founded pureVLC, which was later renamed pureLiFi, with that vision. Haas has made several public demonstrations of LiFi technology. One of the demonstrations at a TED conference revealed the transmission of full HD video using LiFi.
Not surprisingly, the company has attracted venture funding. The company closed a funding round of over $2 million in December 2015 to support continued commercial growth and product development.
The company will introduce LiFi-X, a LiFi dongle, which can use any LED light to transmit data through a secure wireless, 5G technology, light-based communication technology.
The LiFi-X is the third generation of products from the firm. It consists of an access point that connects to any LED light, and a business card sized dongle. The dongle can be operated from any USB 2.0 enabled mobile device. The company asserts that LiFi-X offers a user experience that is comparable and more secure than existing wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi. According to the company, LiFi-X can enable dense 5G and beyond indoor and outdoor wireless networks.
pureLiFi says that the product is the key to giving future mobile users 100 times higher data rates. The company anticipates that the immediate future of its products is their incorporation into smart-homes and -devices through LiFi microchips.
Professor Haas and his team at pureLi-Fi created a complex method of light communication in which multiple simultaneous data streams can be transmitted through tiny changes in light intensity that are invisible to the human eye.
Harald Burchardt, COO of pureLiFi commented, “The LiFi-X is a key step in the future of wireless communications. The product shows the tremendous progress pureLiFi has made over the last 12 months to create a fully USB 2.0 powered dongle that is smaller than a credit card and can be used with tablets. Looking forward, the LiFi-X will provide a state-of-the-art basis for future LiFi products with our partners.”
Harald Haas, CEO of pureLiFi, said, “It’s exciting that so many of the tech giants are now engaging directly with LiFi through pureLiFi technologies. The miniaturization and world’s first integration of high-performance LiFi in a dongle is ground-breaking progress towards a LiFi connected world. We have witnessed rumors that Apple is investigating ‘LiFi-Capabilities’ in their latest iOS 9.0. I am excited that we have exceeded our technical roadmap, and with LiFi-X we can develop large-scale pilots.”
Haas foresees the lighting industry’s active role in offering light communication. Haas stated, “We now have a rail-track technology for the lighting industry to develop exciting and new business models around light as a service (LaaS).”
