Wireless Data With Light Bulbs? Is this the future?

I recently watched a video from TED Talks, were Harald Hass discussed the possibilities of wireless data transmission using light. Everywhere you look you see light. This looks to be a great alternative for data transfer.

After watching the video of the conference by Harald Hass, he mentions how there are 1.4 million cellular towers in worldwide and over 5 billion phone devices being used worldwide. So with this in mind he brings up the point the four major problems that are affecting wireless data use in today’s technology. These four problem areas are capacity, efficiency, availability and security. The best way to describe this is that for capacity todays phone devices use radio waves to transmit data if you did not know we are running out of the radio waves and this is making radio waves more expensive to get. As for efficiency, cellular towers are not very efficient. The towers use more power just to keep themselves cooled down then they actually use to do their job, now taking a look at the availability and security. You can’t use your phone in places such as hospital or airplanes so this limits are availability to use our devises, also because these devices use radio waves they are easily able to be hacked into making your content available to others.

How can using light be a better alternative? There are lights everywhere you look so if everyone would change there lights to an energy efficient LED light the possibility of transferring data could exist everywhere and more efficiently than how we are doing it today. As Harald Haas showed in his speech, If we take a look at the electromagnetic spectrum of radio waves and visible waves (which is what led is considered) we have 10,000 more times the spectrum that can be used, making the possibilities of transferring data much more effective and efficient. The security would be much better because light cannot travel through walls allowing others to tap into your devices.