Optical Routers: From Radio to Laser
Scottish professor Harald Haas has been developing a way to transmit digital information using lasers, instead of the radio frequencies used in modern wi-fi.
His project has been working for the last four years to bring this “Li-fi” technology to life, using solar energy and a flickering LED system to transmit data. This would be faster than wi-fi, but requires line-of-sight connectivity.
This isn’t as big a limitation as it initially appears to be, as the LED pulses will be omnidirectional. A single Li-Fi router in the center of your room could supply information to everything operating on the same network.
For more distant transmissions, a similar technology could use multi-frequency laser beams. These beams would be almost impossible to “snoop” on due to their highly directional nature, unless the eavesdropping device were inserted into the beam itself. A community could set up a system of rooftop pylon relays to transmit the data along a set path, and as long as nothing interrupted said path, it would be powerful and secure.
A further extrapolation might see orbital (or stratospheric) information satellites beaming information to and from positions high above any receivers.
Staving off technoshock
Haas just announced the creation of a prototype Li-Fi router, and as I’m neck deep writing a thriller set in 2026 it’s causing me to re-evaluate some of the ways I present future technology. This is a good thing, though. I’m only on the first draft, so it won’t be hard for me to shuffle some things around without collapsing the whole house of cards.
I think.
That’s one of my goals when I write science fiction, though — to make my predictions as logically sound as possible, to extrapolate to a degree where tomorrow’s developments won’t invalidate today’s imaginings.
Have you read a science fiction book written in the past that was off-base enough about today’s technology that it pulled you out of the narrative?
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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