This lamp beams internet to your laptop

So you’ve heard of Wi-Fi. You might even be on Wi-Fi right now. But what if you hate Wi-Fi? What if you are just really, morally opposed to and personally offended by Wi-Fi, but still want wireless internet? Then finally, you have an answer: Li-Fi — internet delivered via infrared light.

Li-Fi is not exactly new, but a company named Oledcomm is one of the first to bring it to market in a way that’s accessible to consumers. It’s created a product named MyLiFi that lets you get internet wirelessly using a lamp and a dongle that plugs into your computer’s USB port. I got to test it out at CES today, and it definitely works. But there are so many drawbacks that I find it hard to imagine why someone would want to buy one.

MyLiFi has two parts: a lamp, and a dongle. The lamp is actually pretty cool. It has a very distinct and pretty stylish look with a bright pop of color from the cable visibly snaking up it. The lamp functions as normal lamp — in addition to its networking functions — with a handful of smart features. It can transition from cool to warm light (though this was a little buggy during my demo), and a connected app can be used to control it and set timers. A pro version will also include a light sensor that lets the lamp automatically adjust as the sun sets.

But the internet connection isn’t actually being delivered via this visible light. Instead, there’s a small circle at the center of the lamp that both sends and receives infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. You can think about this a little bit like the fiber-optic cables that might be used to deliver your home broadband connection: it’s just a bunch of quickly flashing lights that convey information to computers; in this case, the light is just invisible instead of being wrapped inside a cable. (The small “antenna” you see in the middle of the infrared light is purely a visual touch — there’s no radio being transmitted here.)

Since your computer isn’t built to receive information over infrared light, you need to connect a dongle in order to receive a connection from the lamp. The dongle is basically just the same infrared sender / receiver that’s in the middle of the lamp, but pulled out on its own and with a short USB cable attached to it.

The technology definitely works. About 15 seconds after plugging it into my MacBook, the lights on it turned green to indicate I had an internet connection — I didn’t have to install anything, it just started. The speed maxes out at 23 Mbps, but it didn’t feel particularly slow in use (at least compared to the sluggish speeds I’ve been dealing with elsewhere at CES).

Oledcomm points to two core benefits of using MyLiFi over a traditional Wi-Fi router. The first is, unfortunately, pretty bad: if you’re worried about the health effects of radio waves, that isn’t a problem here. Except, evidence is slim that Wi-Fi or other radio waves are harmful to humans — our current understanding of radio waves suggests they ought not to harm us.

The second given benefit is the more interesting one: Wi-Fi is really good at penetrating walls; light isn’t. So it’ll be much harder to pick up someone else’s Li-Fi signal to read their data, whereas that’s not a huge challenge for a nefarious party near a Wi-Fi router.

Of course, this also speaks to the product’s downsides. First and foremost: even though the connection is wireless, you need to be in a direct line of sight with the lamp in order to get a connection. Oledcomm’s CEO, Benjamin Azoulay, describes the connection as “an ethernet cable of light.” And if you try to bend or twist that cable, it just doesn’t work — I tried misaligning the dongle slightly from the lamp, and the connection immediately broke. You’re really limited here in where you can move.

The absurdity really stands out when you consider how MyLiFi gets internet in the first place: via an ethernet connection. So you have this ethernet cable sitting inches away from your laptop. But instead of plugging it into your computer, you buy an expensive lamp, have it beam internet to a dongle, and get internet that way instead. You’d probably have an easier time moving around with an ethernet cable attached, and you’d have an even more secure connection that way, too.

Oledcomm plans to release more lights later on, including ceiling lights and wall lamps, so that you’ll eventually be able to blanket a room with infrared internet. The big picture makes a bit more sense that way, but it still seems like an expensive and overly complicated alternative when Wi-Fi already works perfectly well.

MyLiFi is launching on Indiegogo today, looking to raise $50,000. The lamp costs about $840 and comes with one dongle. Only a single person can use the lamp at a time (multi-user support is supposed to arrive later this year), so you can’t buy additional dongles.