Creating digital superhighways with optical wireless communication

Wi-Fi and other wireless communications techniques are great, but they have their limits: there’s only so much data you can squeeze into the radiofrequency spectrum. Even with advanced signal modulation and spatial multiplexing techniques, it’s a struggle to keep up with the exponentially growing data demand. Tellingly, 5G has to annex another part of the electromagnetic spectrum – the millimeter-wave domain – to open up additional capacity.

Further up the spectrum, in the visible and infrared region, there’s even more bandwidth available. We’re quite familiar with that part, of course, because packets of light have been zipping through optical fibers for decades already, at high speed and with low latency and excellent energy efficiency. Efforts to release these photons from their glass prisons have been started years ago, but there’s still some way to go before radio waves get serious competition from optical wireless communication.