We’re going to hazard a guess that it’s been a while since most of you used good ‘ol IrDA to transfer any data to your cellphone, but it looks like the folks at KDDI have got themselves on an old school kick, and they’re now looking to bring the technology back to some of its former glory. To that end, the company recently revealed its progress on a new form of the technology that upgrades transfer speeds to a full 1Gbps, or about 250 times faster than the previous limit. That’s apparently possible by replacing the standard LED with a new speedy new semiconductor laser, which gets paired with some nonvolatile memory to ensure that burst of data doesn’t get lost along the way. Of course, all this is still in the early stages, and KDDI doesn’t even seem to be offering so much as a hint as to when we might actually see it put to use.

[Via The Boy Genius Report]