Guest Column: LiFi: Tech Leapfrog over Killer 5G?

For home and office use, it looks like LiFi dusts WiFi running away
By Brian R. Wright

Too good to be true, or a White Horse technology to take us away from all the biohazards and surveillance nightmares of RF proliferation? I’m basically doing a core dump, which started from a reference to the following column sent to me by the mythic demigod of local liberty activism known as David Lonier, of Auburn Hills, Michigan:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GkXyEgHRAcY

To which I launched the following tentative, “Wow, we all need to see where this goes!” discussion… including several more videos from TED (technology, entertainment, design) and others:

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd8G9d-Begs
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkXyEgHRAcY
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-ncPjD1IeY
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UulEFh8yhCg
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF_48GX0VYk

As I recall, the #3 TED talk provides the strongest and most optimistic advocacy.

The following was my initial response to David Lonier:

I’m looking at the electromagnetic spectrum and see that the frequency of visible light is 300 THz, which is why the data carrying capacity so much higher than radio waves (100s of MHz), but my question is this: why does light from a light bulb cause no harm when radiated radio waves from a cellular tower or from a WiFi router–which have much less frequency–present a real biohazard?

Answering my own question, it must be that the radio waves are AMPLIFIED significantly to go through the air medium, and as I remember my physics, the power/square meter is as the square of the amplitude. Which makes sense. Also there are differences in penetration, e.g. skin, depending on what frequency you’re running.

… we don’t need to worry about exposure to the light waves in LiFi, because it’s normal visible light as generated by a light bulb and equipped for dataflow. It looks like the LiFi “network” backbone is or could be nothing more nor less than specially designed street lights I’m guessing hooked up or backed up/augmented with fiberoptic cable.

None of these speakers seems to be worried about surveillance or health. But I think the major health problems go away, because 5G cellular wireless won’t be able to handle the bandwidth, called spectrum crunch. So who needs cell towers (or death towers masquerading as cell towers) or millimeter wave beaming satellites? Gone. Leapfrogged. What a bunch of bozos are the corporate behemoths who didn’t see this coming (looks like Prof. Harald Haas coined the term in 2011/2012 via TED). Continue reading