This report discusses ‘Wi-Fi HaLow’, a Wi-Fi standard developed primarily to support IoT applications that require long range and extended battery life, which otherwise would mostly use LPWA technologies such as NB-IoT, LTE-M, Sigfox, and LoRaWAN. We discuss the energy-saving features of Wi-Fi HaLow that make it a potential contender technology for low-power and long-distance applications. The high data throughput and low latency capabilities offered by Wi-Fi HaLow allow businesses to consider the deployment of this network technology in contexts that might not suit the aforementioned LPWA technologies that transmit and receive small packets of data at low speeds.
We examine the capabilities of Wi-Fi HaLow and discuss some of the stand-out features that make it suitable for a range of IoT use-cases. In addition, we compare Wi-Fi HaLow with the established LPWA network technologies namely, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, LTE-M, and NB-IoT, considering deployment parameters such as range, data rate, latency, power consumption, and chipset cost.
The report also lists multiple real-world field trials that have tested the performance of Wi-Fi HaLow in multiple IoT contexts such as smart cities, smart warehouses, smart buildings, smart farming, smart school campuses, smart homes, and smart industrial facilities. Finally, the report lists some of the major vendors that provide Wi-Fi HaLow chipsets and modules.
