Data via light for Philips worth millions

- Philips Lighting sees more value in sending data via light. The divested Philips component has quietly taken over the French Li-Fi specialist Colombelles.

The technology that Philips Lighting continues called Li-Fi, short for light fidelity, with the technology of LED lighting is used to transmit data wirelessly.

In 2015 began supermarket Carrefour and Philips on an experimental ledsysteem customers- should lead to the correct shelves in supermarkets- through an app on their smartphone. Example, they are highlighted promotions or qualitatively the best variant in the shop. Philips sees many more possibilities.

The acquisition is reported by LEDs Magazine, and confirmed by Philips Lighting. According LEDs Magazine, eight employees at Philips Lighting, which previously would have paid € 10 million. Philips refrains from commenting on this amount.

The advantage of Li-Fi technology is that data rates are achieved over 10GBs, which is about a hundred times faster than the average of a Wi-Fi network.

According LEDs Magazine, the LED light can present a color 3,5gbps sending of data. With three colors, red, green and blue, which makes for a total bandwidth of 10Gbps. The system runs on 1.4 million base stations of so-called cellular radio masts.

With another five billion mobile cellular phones that emit more than 600 terabytes of data every month, the importance of wireless communication is increasing.