Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, which makes Hue-branded smart lights, announces new Li-Fi lights called Truelifi with data transfer speeds of up to 150 Mbps
Jon Porter / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Li-Fi has spent years as a lab story — researchers demonstrated a light-based system targeting 100 Gbps speeds back in 2015, but always with the catch that it needs direct line of sight. Signify's Truelifi announcement is the moment the former Philips Lighting brings that idea into a shippable product, at 150 Mbps rather than lab speeds.
First-order effects
- Signify now sells light fixtures that double as wireless access points, putting the company in direct competition with conventional Wi-Fi deployments inside the offices and buildings where its lighting is already installed.
- Buyers get a new connectivity option piggybacking on fixtures they were purchasing anyway, with the line-of-sight requirement from the original research still defining where Truelifi can actually serve.
Second-order effects
- pureLiFi's $18M Series B for optical Gigabit components designed to integrate into mobile devices shows the other half of the market forming: Signify owns the ceiling, pureLiFi wants to own the receiver — the two will need each other or compete head-on.
- The gap between Truelifi's 150 Mbps and the 100 Gbps research targets keeps pressure on Signify's roadmap while giving Wi-Fi vendors room to respond on raw throughput.
Third-order effects
- If fixtures keep doubling as network infrastructure, building connectivity could consolidate around lighting vendors — the companies already wired into every room gain a structural advantage over radio-only networking players.
- Receiver-side adoption becomes the bottleneck: without Li-Fi silicon in laptops and phones (pureLiFi's stated aim), the technology stays confined to fixed installations no matter how fast the fixtures get.
The trend: Li-Fi is crossing from research demos to commercial products, with lighting vendors like Signify claiming the infrastructure layer while component startups race to put receivers into consumer devices.