Low-Power Wi-Fi transmission standard HaLow for Iot Devices

Low-Power Wi-Fi transmission standard HaLow for Iot Devices

In most homes, Wi-Fi has become a very important connection method, but many smart home products have never used Wi-Fi connection methods. Why?

One of the biggest problems that many companies do not want their products to use Wi-Fi connections is that Wi-Fi consumes too much power, this is not enough for smart home products that are small, inexpensive, or that require one-time charging for several months or even a year.

Therefore, this is also a problem that the entire Wi-Fi Alliance has been working hard to solve for so many years. Now, the Wi-Fi Alliance has brought about a brand new Wi-Fi protocol that can run on low-power devices. At the same time, it can spread farther away and build stronger wall-crossing capabilities. Basically, the new Wi-Fi protocol has greatly improved power consumption for smart home devices and IOT devices.

It is reported that this new Wi-Fi protocol is called Wi-Fi HaLow and will become an extension of the upcoming 802.11ah standard. The Wi-Fi Alliance plans to launch products supporting the HaLow protocol in 2018.

In essence, HaLow is a Wi-Fi Alliance's response to Bluetooth, in the future, it will become a necessary connection method for fitness tracking devices, sensors, cameras, and a variety of other professional products. HaLow needed a more convincing way than Bluetooth to conquer manufacturers and consumers, while Kevin Robinson, vice president of marketing at the Wi-Fi Alliance, said: "Wi-Fi HaLow will provide power consumption advantages similar to other connection methods."

If HaLow has ultra-low power consumption as promised by the Wi-Fi Alliance, it will have a higher transmission capability than Bluetooth and a longer transmission distance. After all, once HaLow is connected to a router, the entire Internet. At present, the outside world still has some doubts about HaLow's performance. At the same time, it is necessary to upgrade the hardware of existing products, we need to upgrade the Wi-Fi chip to support HaLow for products such as smartphones and routers, but we believe that over time, just like the current 5 GHz Wi-Fi, it has been gradually accepted by more users.

In addition, HaLow has more potential because it can work in a MHz band, this is more popular and more arrived than the 2.4GHz and 5Ghz of existing Wi-Fi (but HaLow may interfere in some cases at a glance like Wi-Fi ).

Of course, it does not mean that HaLow has no disadvantages. For example, HaLow is not good at fast data transmission. After all, it is not developed for wireless Internet access, so it does not require much data transmission. Hardware vendors use HaLow technology to reduce power consumption at the cost of network transmission speed.

In fact, HaLow has been in the smart home field for now since two years ago, and now the IOT and smart home have begun to become the mainstream, and HaLow has also reached the best time to show its skills. Robinson said that HaLow will play an important role in Iot. Technology HaLow is not the only connection method, but will also become the most important component.