Li-Fi enhances US Army connectivity

8th December 2021 - 14:45 GMT | by The Shephard News Team

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USAREUR-AF Chief Technology Officer Andrew Foreman demonstrates Kitefin with a Getac tablet during a Li-Fi exhibition event in August 2021 at USAG Wiesbaden. (Photo: Candy Knight)

Li-Fi optical wireless communications solve certain limitations associated with RF communications, says US Army.

UK-based pureLiFi has secured another contract to supply its Kitefin system to the US Army, in what the company described on 8 December as a ‘multi-million dollar deal’.

This follows an earlier deployment of Kitefin by US Army Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF), which will now expand its use of the technology.

USAREUR-AF Chief Technology Officer Andrew Foreman said: ‘Li-Fi technologies answer all three of the serious issues associated with the RF portion of the spectrum. First, due to the low probability of detection, jamming, and intrusion, FSO [free-space optics] and Li-Fi offer an extremely survivable form of communications when in direct conflict with a near-peer adversary.’

Technologies such as Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G use radio frequencies to transmit data, which produce large areas of RF emissions that are easy to detect, intercept, and can cause overcrowding resulting in slow speeds and unreliable communications.

Li-Fi, on the other hand, uses light rather than radio frequencies resulting in wireless communications that (according to pureLiFi) ‘is more reliable, significantly more secure, and simpler to deploy’.