Apple could be testing a technology that is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi

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hyperspace_falcon

Star Wars

The Millennium Falcon goes into hyperspace.

Apple could be testing a technology called Li-Fi, a play-on-words of Wi-Fi, according to code found within iOS 9.1.

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Li-Fi was invented by Harald Haas, a researcher at Edinburgh University, and has since been worked on by a number of companies.

The technology is around 100 times faster than Wi-Fi - with speeds of around 224 gigabits per second - because it uses the light spectrum to transmit data.

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It's unclear how Apple intends to use the technology or whether it will make it into the rumoured iPhone 7.

There is currently no technology on the market that uses Li-Fi, so there is little to compare it to. However, one use could be talking to other devices within the same room, such as the Apple TV. The high data speeds mean a film could be sent from an iPhone to the TV within seconds, ready to stream. (This is just speculation, though - it's still early days for the technology.)

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Apple filed for a patent in 2013 that talked about an "optical modulation using an image sensor" that used the iPhone's camera to transmit data via light, a technology that could be used with Li-Fi.

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