China has launched the world's first commercial grade visible light communication chip that supports transmission as fast as 10 gigabytes a second, or 10 times a 5G mobile network.
The chip released Friday at the August 23-25 Smart China Expo, in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, uses a light-emitting diode to surf the internet.
The chip is "safe, stable, high-speed and efficient with a low cost," Wu Jiangxing, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was quoted as saying by news site people.cn on Friday.
Visible light communication (VLC) is a telecommunication technology with low carbon emissions which could realize zero energy consumption, the report said.
It could also efficiently avoid electromagnetic signal leakage, a foible of conventional radio communication.
Mass production would bring a breakthrough to the telecommunication industry and set a milestone for building a smart home, Wu said.
Fu Liang, a Beijing-based telecoms industry expert, said that the technology is still in its experimental stage with problems to be resolved before mass application.
"Internet service providers and users must upgrade their devices to be compatible with VLC equipment," Fu told the Global Times. "It's not an easy or short-term process to complete the change."
Construction of a network and maintaining its high-speed bandwidth for households "would be another problem," Fu said.
The technology might be used in some industries, but it was too early to talk about its future in daily domestic life, Fu said.
