PureLiFi has deployed its high speed light-based wireless internet network at an elementary school in Scotland. South Ayrshire Council’s Kyle Academy is now the first school in the world to pilot a LiFi network within classrooms. The project is supported by the University of Edinburgh’s LiFi Research and Development Center.
PureLiFi says its LiFi solution delivers a secure, bidirectional and fully networked wireless solution that offers increased bandwidth capacity by using light waves instead of radio waves. The pilot deployment uses pureLiFi’s LiFi-XC system, which incorporates LiFi-enabled LED light bulbs installed in the ceilings of the classrooms. Students are given LiFi adapters that they plug into their laptops to access the LiFi network. The increased capacity of the LiFi system will help beat network congestion at the school as classrooms rely more and more on internet-connected devices.
“LiFi is a transformative technology that will enable the next generation of wireless communications,” said pureLiFi CEO Alistair Banham in a statement. “At Kyle Academy, LiFi has enhanced the classroom into a fully connected environment allowing students to have a world of educational tools at their fingertips through light. The students at Kyle Academy are taking part in the early adoption of technology that will someday be in every light and every device connecting everyone and everything.”
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LiFi technology has been around for a number of years but has seen few deployments to date. Professor Harald Haas, chief scientific officer of pureLiFi and a professor of mobile communications at the University of Edinburgh, has been dubbed the “father of LiFi” after introducing the technology to the world at a TED Global talk in 2011, where he demonstrated light fidelity for the first time and coined the term LiFi. He co-founded pureLiFi, which in 2016 launched its first LiFi dongle—LiFi-X—and integrated LiFi luminaire.
PureLiFi held a trial of the technology in 2016 with Singapore’s Info-communications Development Media Authority to explore use cases of the technology in enterprise and home networking. Apple has also flirted with the idea of using LiFi in its iPhones, and Disney has explored using LiFi in merchandise. Last month, European operator O2 announced a trial using pureLiFi’s LiFi-XC system with nine LED bulbs installed in O2’s headquarters in Slough, U.K.