The Wi-Fi Alliance has approved a new Wi-Fi standard that increases network range rather than frequency and bandwidth:
The Wi-Fi Alliance announced that it approved a new wireless technology standard called the 802.11ah. The devices supporting it will work on the 900MHz band and will have twice the range of devices working on the 2.4GHz band. The new standard is meant to be used in smart homes, connected cars, digital healthcare, as well as in agricultural, industrial and smart city environments.
In the past few years, the Wi-Fi Alliance approved the 802.11ac standard, which provides roughly 1Gbps bandwidth over the 5GHz band, as well as the more recent 802.11ad, which has even higher multi-Gbps bandwidth, but works over a much shorter range on the 60GHz band.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has been focusing on improving bandwidth performance at the cost of range and lower obstacle penetration. However, with the new 802.11ah standard, codenamed "HaLow" (made up of the "ah" letters and the "low" word from low-power), the Wi-Fi Alliance wants to extend the range of its wireless technology and lower the power consumption for the embedded devices that will end up using it.
According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, the 900MHz band will allow the new wireless technology to not only have double the range of the current Wi-Fi standards, but it will also be able to penetrate walls and other obstacles more reliably.
Here's the Wi-Fi Alliance press release and the Wikipedia article.
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Wi-Fi Alliance rebrands 802.11ac as Wi-Fi 5, picks 802.11ax as Wi-Fi 6
The Wi-Fi Alliance today announced a significant rebranding of the "802.11" Wi-Fi standards that have long served as a source of potential confusion for users: Going forward, the current 802.11ac standard will be known as Wi-Fi 5, while its successor 802.11ax will be known as Wi-Fi 6, establishing a generational terminology that — like Bluetooth 3, 4, and 5 — will be easier for customers to remember and understand.
[...] Today's announcement is significant not just because of its impact on currently popular Wi-Fi standards, but also on one that's been on the fringe: 802.11ad. Also known as WiGig, 802.11ad notably depends on an extra, 60GHz millimeter wave wireless antenna to boost speeds of compatible devices in the same room as the router. A handful of routers and devices, including wireless VR adapters, have adopted 802.11ad over the past year or two.
But the announcement makes clear that the Wi-Fi Alliance sees 802.11ax, not 802.11ad, as the next stage of Wi-Fi's evolution. 802.11ax has no need for the extra antenna, instead making more efficient use of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands already used by 802.11ac — err, Wi-Fi 5. Wi-Fi 6 promises up to 11 Gbps speeds across three or more devices, with a single Wi-Fi 6 device achieving up to 5 Gbps.
In a statement to VentureBeat, the Alliance explained how Wi-Fi 6 and WiGig will coexist:
"Wi-Fi 6 and WiGig, based on 802.11ad and eventually 802.11ay, will continue to evolve in parallel and remain strong complements to one another within the Wi-Fi portfolio of technologies. We fully expect some products to integrate Wi-Fi 6 and WiGig, which will remain a distinct brand to indicate products that support 60 GHz Wi-Fi for multi-gigabit, low-latency connectivity."
Also at Ars Technica, The Verge, and Tom's Hardware.
Related: Wi-Fi Alliance Approves 802.11ah "HaLow" Standard for the 900 MHz Band
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Intel to Cease Shipments of Current WiGig Products, Focus on WiGig for VR
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday January 06 2016, @08:36PM
The new standard is meant to be used in smart homes, connected cars, digital healthcare, as well as in agricultural, industrial and smart city environments.
As well as your neighbors two streets away.
This bodes well for municipal wifi, but since nobody has the wifi devices with this standard it will probably be 8 years before it is deployed except perhaps as wifi repeater technology.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2016, @09:21PM
I hope they have more than 3 non-overlapping [wikipedia.org] channels (4 colour theorem say you need at least 4 in 2D space to avoid interference).
(Score: 3, Informative) by ese002 on Thursday January 07 2016, @01:48AM
I hope they have more than 3 non-overlapping channels (4 colour theorem say you need at least 4 in 2D space to avoid interference).
Not very likely. The 900Mhz band is only 26Mhz wide vs 100Mhz for 2.4Ghz and 150Mhz for 5Ghz
Looks like they will have to reduce data rate just to fit one channel. More likely reduce data rate a lot to fit two channels. The 900Mhz band is crowded. If you need the whole band to be functional, it will never work.
Cordless phones used to be mostly in 900Mhz until it got too crowded and they moved to 2.4Ghz.
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Thursday January 07 2016, @04:06AM
What current equipment is using 900MHz? I did a quick Google [wikipedia.org], and didn't find a whole lot. Even the section "Current amateur uses" seems like a list of fringe cases.
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Thursday January 07 2016, @05:03AM
It covers a lot of territory.
Cellular phones for some carriers use these ranges, specifically LTE band 8.
There are also some that fall under the general category of "Business", which are probably all short range radio links for telemetry or coms.
It is used in electrical coops and utilities etc. Also some motorola trunking services for mobile coms.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday January 06 2016, @09:25PM
But the HaLow isn't supposed to be used the way you are suggesting, so yeah, no one has that, and it won't be for you to buy for that purpose you are suggesting.
It's for the IoT stuff -- not for pcs, laptops and phones -- unless those are acting as controllers of some kind. IoT in this context being "everything that isn't on the network already but we've figured out a way to try to monetize or otherwise use your tracked info to provide a service" sort of context. Imagine your NEST thermostat talking to the power company smart grid meter, and your being forbidden to do anything about it or violating/tampering with hardware that has to meet federal regulations.
I imagine a lot of this will be poorly secured things like SCADA network stuff -- except for internet of things. Imagine a SCADA network of X10 stuff, wirelessly, over the 900mhz spectrum. You could, if you broke the air gap, get onto such a network and probably see problems and cause them as well. Perhaps change neighbors house temperatures or make their fridge thing its out of eggs.
Or dig out an old cordless phone jammer (its the 900mhz range) and take down the IoT network for the whole neighborhood simply by using radio shack tech from the 1980s.
In any event, under normal circumstances, you would not be using this the same way you'd stream netflix to your mobile device over wireless of some kind. I am sure we can get onto it if we wanted to, but not without some effort.
This also, perhaps by design, will make it much harder to keep an eye on since its designed to not compete with the same bandwidth; most people wont even have the option to see what is ratting them out, let alone block it at their firewall.
I am sure that since the 900mhz range is open, there will be tools to hop on and run wireshark on a connected device to see what is going on -- but it won't be as easy to simply "firewall off the iot stuff" as it presently is today, because by design, they are going to avoid the consumers from getting in the way.
They do not mention it, but I imagine this is an excellent time for IPv6 to be deployed on such equipment. That way everything you own and don't manage can be uniquely identified as belonging to you. You wont swap out the smart grid meter nearly as often as your phone, most likely -- or smoke detectors, alarm systems and stuff. So when you disable the gateway on your phone, it can still pick up your mac address and determine what rooms in the house or hotel or mall or whatever, simply because you'll reflect that back over the regular network, and this 900mhz network of sensors will report that back to wherever as part of the data collection.
I imagine it also will be of use for cars and the future of robocars on the roads in the future. They are certainly not going to rely on wifi today as we know it!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 06 2016, @09:53PM
Sure it's for IoT, but I'd really like to have decent WiFi coverage inside my home, even when the signal does have to penetrate two or three walls.
Mostly, the issues we have are from bad laptop WiFi antenna implementations (Dell) where a USB dongle performs much better, but even with the dongle, I feel like I should be connecting in some places that I don't.
If it's fast enough to stream DVD quality video from Netflix, do we need more than that? A good implementation for laptops would go multi-band and only use the 900MHz when the faster channels aren't working.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jummama on Wednesday January 06 2016, @10:05PM
900MHz is well within the range of an RTL-SDR dongle. The question is, what is the channel width going to be? RTL-SDR is good for 2-3MHz wide signals. If the signal is narrow enough, it can be monitored fairly cheaply and easily.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 07 2016, @12:01AM
Its a transmission standard, and radio protocol.
It will be used for anything you can imagine as long as the bandwidth is sufficient.
No standard has ever been successful in limiting usage to a specific class of products. There is no way to limit it in the way you imagine.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @09:40AM
Do you know any application of the NTSA standard for devices other than those directly related to television?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 07 2016, @07:49PM
Do you know any application of the NTSA standard for devices other than those directly related to television?
http://www.nsta.org/preservice/ [nsta.org]
More proof that one should have to pass a written test and possess a licence to post AC.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday January 09 2016, @06:06PM
I agree with you that the intended purpose is unlikely to remain that purpose -- I tried to leave me an exit with that in mind; people will be creative with it when they want to know what it is doing or simply want to repurpose things to better behave the way they want it to (or piggyback on that network).
My primary concern was to indicate that people will not be pointed to this for their newegg/amazon recommendations. That will probably be the wi-gig or wimax, or whatever they are calling the 60ghz spectrum stuff. That stuff has been out for a while, but from the looks of CES, it will see its marketing sun rise in the near future.
There likely will not be a lot of consumer attention to the 802.11ah wifi mechanics of the IoT -- just the amazing benefits of it being convenient and easy and without impacting your other stuff.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 07 2016, @01:53AM
There's no need to confine this standard to IoT. Why not use it for low-bandwidth Wi-Fi connections to laptops? A stable long-range connection with low bandwidth can be preferable to a flaky 802.11a/b/g/n/ac. Good enough for IRC anyway, and maybe VOIP calling on phones.
Adoption could be pretty fast. Plenty of new laptops and most new smartphones have 802.11ac. 802.11ah could be adopted in new devices within 2-3 years. Routers that support the standard could connect to your device using 900 MHz only when it is needed - far away.
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(Score: 2) by Alfred on Wednesday January 06 2016, @08:44PM
(Score: 2, Disagree) by SanityCheck on Wednesday January 06 2016, @09:42PM
HaLow from the other side....
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2016, @11:00PM
5GHz is great in apartment and other high density places where everyone has their own AP and wireless equipment blasting at full power. Since 5Ghz does not penetrate walls and obstacles well it is a pretty practical way to keep things sane... 2.4Ghz is basically unusable in those areas since everyone's AP is turned to full power. I see what they are trying to do but I foresee this band becoming completely unusable in hi density areas.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 07 2016, @02:29AM
I expect that routers supporting the standard will work on 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz, and 900 MHz bands, with devices falling back to the appropriate band based on distance and other conditions.
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(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday January 06 2016, @11:06PM
I don't see any mention of actual, real-life range for this. Some of the "IoT" 900MHz radios I've worked with can do up to ~2km when there are no real obstacles in the way (other than the ground - we didn't have these elevated). Of course, that's at 160kbps.
"Nearly twice the range of existing WiFi" isn't a whole lot by my observation. It means it'd reach to my neighbour and no further, pretty much. In an agricultural scenario you ideally want ranges up to ~5km, so it sounds like HaLow would fall well short of that. Maybe they intend it for C2C* comms?
*) Cow-to-Cow
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fishybell on Wednesday January 06 2016, @11:29PM
My experience with UHF & VHF (specifically with 150 - 550 mHz devices) radios is that there is no support for multiple devices to be talking at the same time unless you manually set different frequencies for each one, and you have a central computer listening on several frequencies.
Also, the modems that they come with have throughput — to be sent by only one device at a time per frequency — in the 2400 to 19200 baud range. WiFi and similar standards use various multiplexing protocols to allow devices to talk, seemingly, at the same time. For the radios available to me it was typical to wait up to half a second for the transmitter to be on so the modem could talk.
To top it off, the longer the distance, the more trees, hills, etc., the lower the speed you have to use to deal with it. Sure, you can get 50+ km with the right antenna, but if you have a broad area of say, a military sniper training range, almost as wide as it is long (and they are long), and you want to talk back and forth with over 50 robotic targets at the same time, with good response time, good fracking luck.
The market in the lower frequencies is geared heavily towards SCADA [wikipedia.org] networks where individual radios are polled one at a time, with each event waiting until successful transmission and reception from both sides. For this type of deployment, the existing hardware works well. If you need sub-second timing, control, and response, you need something like what is described here.
The military contracts, per base, per range, would explicitly list a set of frequencies that weren't in use by other equipment and you just had to make it work. (yes, you could often talk them into letting you install a wireless mesh network, but not always)
Something like this would have made my job immensely easier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @12:54AM
A commercial application for this could be race car telemetry. Currently this is high end (expensive) stuff and in some cases the telemetry actually is a burst when the car passes the pit lane--sends a lap worth of data all at once when in range. If prices come down to consumer levels, telemetry could be affordable to racers in all the lower and amateur classes, even down to karts. I've also seen telemetry (power and speed measurements) by normal Wi-Fi from a bicycle inside a velodrome (indoor bike track), but it wasn't perfect, sometimes there were dropouts when the bike was on the other side of the track.
(Score: 2, Informative) by ubqNerd on Thursday January 07 2016, @01:41AM
Actual range for any system can vary a lot depending on the path length and conditions. I have a Ubiquiti NanoBridge M900 pair linked over 0.2 mile path but it runs through a heavily wooded neighborhood with two two-story homes in the way. This set uses a Tx power of 28 dBm and a 10 dBi dish on each end (horizontal beam angle about 60 degrees). These are on TV masts about 20 feet up. The Ubiquiti setup/monitoring software shows a "airMAX quality" of about 15%. Data rate is slow with many repeats, but it usually connects through. A dreadful link for most purposes, but it serves a needed link for me.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 07 2016, @02:26AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah#IEEE_802.11_network_standards [wikipedia.org]
I expected to see it here, but I guess nobody has specified it yet.
I noticed that 5 GHz 802.11ac is rated at half the range of 2.4 GHz 802.11n. Could it mean that 802.11ah will achieve 2.66667 times the range of 802.11n?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @09:42AM
The next version will be called HaLow Een, and be released in late autumn.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @11:21AM
holy crap.
in my country the 900Mhz band is a licensed band and some company just "bought" the right to use 10 Mhz of it for ... 2 billion US dollars, hahaha.
i guess if the competition doesn't like them they can randomly fire up one of these off-the-shelf available HALO devices once-in-a-random-jamming-time?
link: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/webmobile/business/Who-are-real-winners-of-900MHz-auction-30275326.html [nationmultimedia.com]