Low-power, Long-range Wi-Fi Halow Introduced, will Extend Wi-Fi for IoT

With industry momentum mounting around a low power Wi-Fi solution, Wi-Fi Alliance 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.

Wi-Fi HaLow extends Wi-Fi into the 900 MHz band, enabling the low power connectivity necessary for applications including sensor and wearables. 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 will 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 is well-suited to meet the unique needs of the Smart Home, Smart City and industrial markets, because of its ability to operate using very low power, penetrate through walls, and operate at significantly longer ranges than Wi-Fi today,” said Edgar Figueroa, President and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance. “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.”

Many devices that support Wi-Fi HaLow are expected to operate in 2.4 and 5 GHz, as well as 900 MHz, allowing devices to connect with Wi-Fi’s ecosystem of more than 6.8 billion installed devices. Like all Wi-Fi devices, Wi-Fi HaLow devices will support IP-based connectivity to natively connect to the cloud, which will become increasingly important in reaching the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT). Dense device deployments will also benefit from Wi-Fi HaLow’s ability to connect thousands of devices to a single access point.

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