This study aimed to develop a linear LED driver for VLC applications which is capable of transmitting multilevel amplitude, such as OFDM formats or pure analog audio – video signals. The proposed driver comprises a general Op-Amp circuit that emits 3–12 Watts LED power. The maximum current of an Op-Amp limits the LED power. This study characterizing the I-V curves and provide insights on how to attain the LED suitable or optimal biasing point. First, the information signal undergoes clipping due to the too high bias point. Second, the LED cannot light up because the bias point is too low. Differently from the conventional Bias-T LED drivers, we exploited the readily available components such as Op-Amp that allows to work as adder device between the data signal and the DC offset. It is also a cost-effective way that uses off-the-shelf Op-Amps. Furthermore, the driver incorporates a DC-offset remover capability for an input similar to the DC signal. The experimental results showed that the linear driver’s bandwidth (BW) is ≥ 500 kHz without affecting the LED when lighting up. Moreover, the design was evaluated with BER analysis and demonstrated with a real VLC transceiver platform. The transceiver platform comprises FPGA Zync-7000, AD7302 DAC, XADC, and an off-the-shelf Analog Front-End (AFE) receiver. The proposed linear driver was clocked at 100 kHz to perform real-time VLC transmission using QPSK modulation and maximum bit-rate measurement. We have achieved a BER of < 1.5 × 10−3 and ∼30 kbps of real-time transmission speed. Therefore, it has a huge potential in IoT-based VLC networks.