By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Wi-Fi technology is generally known to be relatively short range but this is about to change in a big way. The Wi-Fi HaLow standard is now delivering miles and miles of connectivity range at substantial data rates and is suitable for nearly any IoT use case and more. Morse Micro’s newly released HaLowLink 1 does all of this and more for the absurdly low cost of $99. How will any other long or medium range IoT tech be able to compete?
When you’re a startup Wi-Fi chipset vendor the name of the game is of course to build a vibrant ecosystem of partners to get your chips into – hopefully – hundreds of millions of devices, which are nearly always manufactured by someone else. It’s not common for chipset makers to build their own devices. But that’s exactly what Wi-Fi HaLow leader Morse Micro has done with the HaLowLink 1, which as of last week is generally available from Mouser Electronics at a ridiculously low US$99.
But Morse Micro is not only brilliantly seeding the market for HaLow with this low-cost reference device – they’ve also solved possibly the biggest issue in Wi-Fi HaLow networking: Lack of an installed base. They’ve done that by incorporating Wi-Fi 4 into the HaLowLink 1- which means pretty much any Wi-Fi device in existence will be able to connect to the new HaLow device. We don’t have the exact numbers (it is in the billions for sure) but we’re ready to bet that Wi-Fi 4 constitutes the largest installed base of any wireless standard in history.
So here’s what that means: For a couple of hundred bucks you can now extend the range of your Wi-Fi network up to a staggering 16 kilometres (10 miles). Will you get that sort of range all the time? Certainly not – but depending on your design you will get something akin to double-digit multiples of your Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 7 network range and even up to a few kilometres without too much difficulty. That alone is a hugely impressive achievement and requires nothing special other than a couple of HaLowLink 1 APs.
Morse Micro’s 16 km range experiment in Joshua Tree National Park, California, yielded 2 Mbps over 16 km of range while another demonstration verified 7-8 Mbps sustainable data rates along a 2 kilometre stretch of beach front in San Francisco – a data rate high enough to conduct a good quality video call. The long range is of course specifically due to HaLow’s efficient use of the unlicensed sub-GHz band (which is not available everywhere but relatively plentiful in North America, for example).
So what’s the future of HaLow? If you’re looking for up to a couple of kilometres of range and perhaps a few tens Mbps or less, HaLow – including the new HaLowLink 1 device – looks like an absolute no-brainer. In general the list of potential use cases for Wi-Fi HaLow is nearly endless and includes home as well as agricultural and industrial IoT. Finally don’t forget that the HaLow standard supports up to an unbelievable 8,000 client devices per AP – should you ever need that. Also note that HaLow – including this AP – also supports meshing across equally impressive distances. There really is a lot to like.
The HaLowLink 1 is both Wi-Fi HaLow and Wi-Fi 4 CERTIFIED by the Wi-Fi Alliance.
The world’s first Wi-Fi HaLow Global Summit takes place at the computer history museum in Mountain View, California, on April 28 in conjunction with the Wi-Fi World Congress USA. The event will feature the entire Wi-Fi HaLow ecosystem including plenty of opportunities to experience HaLow live. Get you tickets here.
/Claus.
