HaLow: the new Wi-Fi for the IoT world 

The Wi-Fi Alliance said the Wi-Fi HaLow designation relates to products incorporating IEEE 802.11ah technology. These products operate in frequency bands below one gigahertz and offer long-range, lower-power connectivity for Wi-Fi certified products. The certification program for HaLow is targeted for 2018, but a lot of products will likely become available before that.

Products under this new designation, the group said, will be able to provide connectivity beyond what traditional Wi-Fi currently provides.

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“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 industry, retail, agriculture and Smart City environments,” the alliance said in a statement today. “Wi-Fi HaLow’s range is nearly twice that of today’s Wi-Fi, and will not only be capable of transmitting signals further but also providing a more robust connection in challenging environments where the ability to more easily penetrate walls or other barriers is an important consideration.”

Wi-Fi HaLow extends Wi-Fi into the 900 MHz band, enabling the low power connectivity necessary for applications including sensor and wearables. It will also broadly adopt existing Wi-Fi protocols and deliver many of the benefits that consumers have come to expect from Wi-Fi today, including multi-vendor interoperability, strong government-grade security, and easy setup.

“Wi-Fi HaLow expands the unmatched versatility of Wi-Fi to enable applications from small, battery-operated wearable devices to large-scale industrial facility deployments – and everything in between,” said Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance.

Devices that support Wi-Fi HaLow have to operate in 2.4 and 5GHz as well as 900 MHz in order to connect with Wi-Fi’s ecosystem of over 6.8 billion installed devices.

Wi-Fi HaLow will support IP-based connectivity to natively connect to the cloud.

Dense device deployments will also benefit from HaLow’s ability to connect to thousands of devices to a single access point.

To find out more about Wi-Fi HaLow, click here: www.wi-fi.org/wi-fi-halow