IoT without a license: Wi-Fi Alliance kicks off HaLow

We’re guessing that nobody out there will disagree: Billions of things will be connected to the Internet and it will usher in a brave new world of – well – stuff we can hardly imagine. Thus far, at least half a dozen competing standards have been touting for early world domination in IoT. Here comes a contender that we like a lot here at Wi-Fi NOW.

It’s called HaLow and it was kicked off by the Wi-Fi Alliance earlier this week. HaLow is the trade name for the 802.11ah sub-one-gigahertz standard intended for IoT applications. Technically, HaLow uses the 900 MHz unlicensed ISM band (26 MHz wide) cutting this into twenty-six 100 kbps channels. This also means that for the time being, HaLow will only apply in the so-called ‘Region 2’ (Americas) so the rest of the world will have to wait. Sorry, rest-of-the-world.

According to this source, the range of HaLow is expected to be up to one kilometer – obviously a lot longer than regular Wi-Fi. The bandwidth of HaLow will be a fraction of 802.11ac or n – but just remember that most IoT devices only really need to send little bleeps of data every so often (that’s why today’s remote utility meters can use ancient GPRS or even SMS to send small amounts of data).

It’s still very early days for HaLow – but here’s what we like about it:

• It uses the 900 MHz unlicensed band available for everyone. Just think what the wide-open 2.4 and 5 GHz (Wi-Fi) bands have done for the world-wide consumption of data not to mention billions of happy consumers and big leaps in wireless innovation. If HaLow can seed something similar, it could be the big deal that IoT visionaries have been looking for.
• It’s long range. We don’t know exactly how long. Wi-Fi Alliance says it’s twice the range of regular Wi-Fi and the source above cites one kilometer. Whatever it is it may well be long enough to cover a great deal of IoT use cases, maybe even most of them.
• Devices are likely to be very low cost – just like commercial Wi-Fi today. Imagine connecting billions of things for cents or maybe (at the outset) for a dollar an item. That’s precisely what the IoT industry needs to get off the ground.
• Here comes what we probably like most: HaLow is Wi-Fi. That means it will reuse a lot of the proven low-cost, high performance capabilities of existing 802.11 standards. Wi-Fi Alliance also hints that HaLow technology may piggy-back on standard Wi-Fi chipsets adding myriads of IoT use cases to the already huge Wi-Fi ecosystem.

So a big thumbs up from us on HaLow. And don’t forget – we still don’t know exactly this tech will perform in terms of power. Billions of prospective IoT devices will need to run off battery power for months or even years, so low power performance is critical.

Wi-Fi Alliance says it expects certification to begin in 2018. Some sources expect HaLow products to hit the markets a lot earlier than that.

/Claus.