Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Actually, indoor bandwidth isn't the biggest bottleneck: it is the last mile.
Before the magical, miraculous Li-Fi can do you any good you need fiber to the curb, at least, and an ISP that doesn't meter, throttle, or charge an arm, leg, and firstborn for triple digit bandwidth speeds.
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But indoor bandwidth would still be a bottleneck, at least with Li-Fi. The Li-Fi will get you network service within a room, but that would mean that you'd either need to wire fiber to every room in the house or come up with some other means of getting the traffic from the Li-Fi-equipped lamp (or whatever) to the room where your main home router is located.
Although 100-gigabit Ethernet gear does exist, the gear that mere mortals can afford still maxes out at 1 gigabit per second, with 10-gigabit hardware costing a staggering hundred bucks per port, and 100-gigabit hardware coming in at about one grand per port.
So this is more than 200 times the speed of the fastest Ethernet connections that you're likely to see outside of a data center. And even if you look at the fastest Ethernet that exists at any price, you'd still have to channel-bond at least three fibers to provide a backhaul for a single room (which means $3,000 per room, plus the cost of pulling three fibers and buying the Li-Fi gear itself).
Based on typical rates of technology price gouging, 10-gigabit Ethernet will be affordable in about 5 years. 100-gigabit Ethernet will be affordable in 10 years. The not-yet-standardized 400-gigabit Ethernet will probably not be affordable for at least 15 years. So basically, Li-Fi is at least 15 years away from being practical to deploy. By the time it becomes financially practical to provide a backhaul for Li-Fi, Wi-Fi will probably be just as fast. (*)
(*) Maybe not, but it is far enough in the future that I wouldn't rule out the possibility.