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Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

wi-fi.org

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#21
post #9

It looks neat, but it's hard not to be cynical about yet another competing standard for low-power "smart home" / IoT-type devices, just to muddy the ZigBee vs. Z-Wave vs. BT LE Longrange vs. conventional WiFi waters a bit more. Not saying there's anything wrong with the protocol per se; it's probably perfectly fine. But the lack of widespread standardization in the 900MHz ISM low power space is really crippling what…

Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content. Do you mean by wikipedia's definition of stolen? Because some things, like for instance: the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability. Like I said, this irked me more than it probably should. I totally get sometimes stuff will get caught…

Wikipedia's mission is NOT about usability, but to provide an encyclopedia that can be used, edited, forked, reproduced EVERYWHERE without anyone having to fear lawyer attacks. It's not a "free as in free beer" encyclopedia, it's a "free as in truly free" encyclopedia. (Yes I know that this is only valid for the text content, images (e.g. logos) and screenshots are not free but used under different legal regimes in d…

With all the fundraising activity, it should be about usability and put some aside for those instances.

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So signal drops every time you use the microwave... No thanks.

I thought microwaves (oven) mostly interfere with the 2.4 GHz band. That's why games of Starcraft always lag out when one of the players starts cooking a hot pocket. That's why it's preferable to use 5 GHz 802.11n or 802.11ac, unless you have walls that block the higher frequencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave#Heating_and_power_ap...

Duh, you'd be correct. I had a brain-fart

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#25
post #10

There used to be a good wikipedia article about LoraWan, which is better than this (for IoT) in just about every way, but it has been replaced with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRaWAN LoraWan consumes power at a similar rate that BLE does, except it has a 20km range. You're talking about months (or even years, depending on your interval) of usefulness out of a CR2032 coincell battery. Sidenote: the removal of…

Wow, it claims 2-5km urban and up to 45km rural!

Important question though, is there an affordable module available (ideally also easy to use)? Sniffing around, all I can find is modules costing $45 or more, which kind of kills my enthusiasm for using it in personal projects.

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#26
post #10

There used to be a good wikipedia article about LoraWan, which is better than this (for IoT) in just about every way, but it has been replaced with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRaWAN LoraWan consumes power at a similar rate that BLE does, except it has a 20km range. You're talking about months (or even years, depending on your interval) of usefulness out of a CR2032 coincell battery. Sidenote: the removal of…

LoraWan is super interesting for IOT but as far as I understand it acts more like a traditional radio transmitter? Great for collecting data from lots of discrete sensors but less for bi-directional data transfer

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#27
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it runs at 900 MHz, it will require new hardware. At a minimum, it will require an antenna tuned for the new band, in addition to whatever changes to the WiFi baseband processor are needed to go along with it.

Not exclusively, by the sound of it - the press release notes "Many devices that support Wi-Fi HaLow are expected to operate in 2.4 and 5 GHz as well as 900 MHz".

I interpreted the press release to indicate that WiFi HaLow will be 900 MHz only, but can coexist with traditional WiFi implementations on 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. (The Wikipedia page seems to confirm this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah) Just like when 5 GHz was added, this means getting a new WiFi card -- but that card could support all three bands at the same time.

So this would mean while you're near an AP you'll be on "classic" 2.4/5 GHz, but when you roam further away it would switch to 900 MHz "HaLow" for longer range.

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#28
post #20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content. Do you mean by wikipedia's definition of stolen? Because some things, like for instance: the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability. Like I said, this irked me more than it probably should. I totally get sometimes stuff will get caught…

> the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability that's not how copyright law works. you may argue that it should work that way, but it does not work that way unless you petition Congress to modify it

Still wouldn't change much because, thanks god, the US law is not global ^^

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#29
post #25
post #10

There used to be a good wikipedia article about LoraWan, which is better than this (for IoT) in just about every way, but it has been replaced with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRaWAN LoraWan consumes power at a similar rate that BLE does, except it has a 20km range. You're talking about months (or even years, depending on your interval) of usefulness out of a CR2032 coincell battery. Sidenote: the removal of…

Wow, it claims 2-5km urban and up to 45km rural ! Important question though, is there an affordable module available (ideally also easy to use)? Sniffing around, all I can find is modules costing $45 or more, which kind of kills my enthusiasm for using it in personal projects.

Have a look for RFM98W (434Mhz) or RFM95W (868MHz) on aliexpress/ebay, they're around $14 there.

I know in the UK high altitude balloon community they've used them in flights - http://www.daveakerman.com/?p=1850

Although FSK works just as well in the case of balloons.

Re: Wi-Fi Alliance introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow

#30
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're claiming a copyright problem because some of the text of the page was taken from the Lora Alliance's official website. Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content.

>Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content. Do you mean by wikipedia's definition of stolen? Because some things, like for instance: the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability. Like I said, this irked me more than it probably should. I totally get sometimes stuff will get caught…

Then the organization should have provided the text under an appropriate free license if they wanted it to be broadly reused. (Which is actually a good idea and more organizations should probably do for boilerplate they'd like others to cut and paste.)
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