Free, pervasive wi-fi is a pretty big goal for this generation to figure out. Thanks to Virgin Media, one UK town gets to experience what it’s like to have free high-speed wireless under their feet and at their fingertips at all times. The conglomerate partnered with Chiltern District Council to outfit the town center in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, with Smart Pavement.

The Smart Pavement modules are waterproof resin squares that rest in the sidewalk alongside the regular concrete squares. They connect directly to Virgin’s fiber network, providing free wireless to the homes, businesses, and visitors in the area. According to Virgin, people are seeing speeds of up to 166 Mbps – or about seven times the average UK broadband speed.

The concept of integrating wireless technology into the cityscape is being considered all around the world. As internet access grows in importance, it seems that many are turning their eye toward treating it like a municipal utility – just like water or natural gas. Chesham is a grand experiment in keeping people connected even when away from home and cutting down on their mobile data usage. Installing little wifi modules could (and probably will) become a matter of routine in cities of the future.

The post High Tech on the High Street: UK’s First WiFi Sidewalks first appeared on Gajitz.

Wireless charging has just made a huge new leap, thanks to researchers who have demonstrated that existing Wi-Fi infrastructure can be used to power devices remotely, including battery-free technology or rechargeable lithium-ion, coin-cell batteries, at a range of up 28 feet or more.

Shyam Gollakota worked with a group of University of Washington researchers on PoWiFi, their latest breakthrough demonstration using ambient backscatter radio signals to power devices. The trick to consistent energy: getting existing routers to send out RF signals that are then converted into DC power and voltage-adjusted for the use case.

Their paper on Powering the Next Billion Devices with Wi-Fi expands on the implications of their work and the near-future potential for global wireless power, the key being: usage of existing infrastructure to save time and costs.

From the team at the U of W: “More recently researchers have demonstrated the feasibility of powering sensors and devices in the far field using RF signals from TV [46, 36] and cellular [55, 44] base stations. This is exciting, because in addition to enabling power delivery at farther distances, RF signals can be used to simultaneously charge multiple devices due to their broadcast nature.”

More on their work: “Ambient Backscatter transforms existing wireless signals into both a source of power and a communication medium. It enables two battery-free devices to communicate by backscattering existing wireless signals. Backscatter communication is orders of magnitude more power-efficient than traditional radio communication. Further, since it leverages the ambient RF signals that are already around us, it does not require a dedicated power infrastructure as in RFID.”

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It may not seem like it when you’re scrolling through thousands of pithy comments on Reddit, but a full two-thirds of Earth’s population does not have access to the Internet. That might change dramatically in a few years thanks to an ambitious collaboration between Facebook, Qualcomm, and Nokia. They formed Internet.org, an organization dedicated to bringing affordable internet access to the entire world.

In March 2014, Facebook acquired Ascenta, a company that builds solar-powered drones. The plan, according to Internet.org, is to create and launch unmanned high altitude, long-running solar powered aircraft that can stay aloft for months and deliver reliable internet connectivity anywhere in the world. The UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) will fly at 20 kilometers above the planet’s surface – high enough that they are above high winds and bad weather, but low enough that they can beam down a reliable internet connection. It’s basically exactly the same as Google’s plan to beam internet access down from balloons, but with planes.

The aircraft will be pretty big: around the size of a 747, according to Facebook’s Connectivity Lab. They are calling them “planes” due to their size and, understandably, to avoid the negative connotations associated with flying “drones.” If all goes according to plan, the planes will have their first American trials in 2015 and could be providing wi-fi to currently unconnected places within three to five years. It seems a bit self-serving for several telecommunications giants, and particularly Facebook, to be involved in a plan to connect more people to the internet. But the folks behind the plan claim that the overall goal is to empower the world through the strength of global communication.

The group is also working on larger-scale connectivity solutions for areas of low population density. Their lofty goal is to create a series of connected satellites that will beam down continuous wi-fi signals from space. This is understandably quite a bit more difficult than putting a few planes in the air, so don’t expect to see those satellites launching in the next few years.

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We get nice little notifications when we get a new email – why shouldn’t we get the same notifications when our snail mail is delivered? Mr. Postman is a smart mailbox that lets you know when the postman has been by with iPhone updates. The invention also keeps your incoming and outgoing mail safe while giving you complete control over the whole home snail mail system.

Designed by a company called Simple Elements, Mr. Postman connects to your home wi-fi network. For people whose wi-fi zone doesn’t reach all the way to the mailbox, the company also offers a long-range model. The purpose of the internet hook-up is to communicate to you when there’s something in the mailbox – and to give you the ability to lock and unlock the box whenever you wish. You can even create temporary security codes for neighbors or friends to collect your mail when you’re away on vacation.

When you get a notification that the mail has been received, you can remotely lock the box to keep your mail safe from identity thieves and other mailbox-plundering miscreants. The top of the high tech mailbox is adorned with solar panels to keep it running. A back-up battery is also on board, keeping your cool mail system running even when it’s cloudy.

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The light bulb has become the nearly-universal symbol for an idea. When one has a clever idea, they have a ‘light bulb moment.’ We’ve seen them transformed into flashlights, now a team of Chinese engineers have discovered that they can act as wi-fi emitters.

The team is from the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, where they found that a special LED bulb uses light – rather than the traditional radio frequencies – to carry wi-fi signals. Cutely dubbed “Li-Fi,” it uses a mere five percent of the energy that is needed to run the cell towers and wi-fi stations, which often employ energy cooling components.

Still in early development, the only big obstacle is that you get no wi-fi if the bulb is turned off, which may prove to have a pretty simple solution: when the lights are off, no perusing YouTube for cat videos. Li-Fi is set to premier at the 2013 International Industry Fair in Shanghai. Illuminated minds have created illuminated internet.

The post Bright Idea: Shanghai Team Develops Wi-Fi Light Bulb first appeared on Gajitz.