Wi-Fi solution, Wi-Fi Alliance today announced the Wi-Fi HaLow designation for products incorporating IEEE 802.11ah technology. Wi-Fi HaLow operates in frequency bands below one gigahertz, offering longer range, lower power connectivity to Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products. Wi-Fi HaLow will enable a variety of new power-efficient use cases in the Smart Home, connected car, and digital healthcare, as well as industrial, retail, agriculture, and Smart City environments.
A new low-power, long-range version of Wi-Fi that bolsters Internet of Things (IoT) connections will be dubbed Wi-Fi HaLow, the Wi-Fi Alliance revealed today in advance of CES. Wi-Fi HaLow (pronounced HAY-Low) is based on the pending IEEE 802.11ah specification. It will be used in coming years for everything from smart homes and wearables to smart cities and connected cars where thousands of battery-operated sensors can be connected to a single Wi-Fi Access Point (AP).
Devices that will support HaLow will also support regular Wi-Fi using the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, for areas where the new standard isn’t available.
Even so, the slower throughput of Wi-Fi HaLow will make little difference for many of the futuristic IoT applications being envisioned, where sensors are battery operated and usually transmit occasional short bursts of data. Faster throughput makes a bigger difference in high-definition video and other data-intense and persistent applications.
A sensor on a water pump or a water leak detector in a basement would benefit from Wi-Fi HaLow, for example, because the signal could carry a 900Mhz signal through a concrete wall, at low power, to an access point and on to the rest of the network in the cloud.
For more information on Wi-Fi HaLow, please visit: www.wi-fi.org/wi-fi-halow
