Five years after the WiFi Alliance announced plans for a WiFi variant, 802.11ah (aka HaLow) tailored to the needs of IoT the first products are expected to hit the market.
Michael De Nil, founder and CEO of Australian company Morse Micro, which has developed HaLow chips, told IoTAustralia an announcement of the first certified devices from the WiFi Alliance was imminent. However he was unable to give any indication of the type of devices, or even the number.
“There’s going to be some big announcement very soon, and we will be part of them. Today, you wouldn’t be able to buy a Wi Fi HaLow device, but once the certification happens, then you will be able to,” he said.
Certification verifies not only that devices conform to the standard, but equally important, that they interoperate with each other.
De Nil said HaLow had much to offer the IoT market. “HaLow has 10 times the range of normal WiFi, so that translates to 100 times coverage area and 1000 times volume… We did a test recently in Sydney Harbour of a device with our chips in it and we got a range of about 3.5 kilometres.
“There are two sweet spots for HaLow, one where you want to connect thousands of devices to a single WiFi access point, and control all those devices, and one where you want many megabits of throughput but over greater distance than you can do with today’s WiFi.”
He sees customer for both these applications. “Imagine in an outdoor environment like agriculture. If you’ve got to put in a lot of access points. You have to power them. That means having solar power and batteries everywhere, which obviously ramps up the cost significantly.
“And if you have mobile devices like robots that require real time control, it’s impracticable to have them switching access points all the time.”
An impeccable WiFi heritage
Morse Micro was founded in Sydney specifically to develop WiFi HaLow chips. In 2019 it secured Series A funding of $23.8m from a range of investors. And in November 2020 it raised a further $18m. Today it has 120 employees, mostly in its main office in the Sydney CBD, but also has offices in the US, China and India. Cofounder Andrew Terry told IoTAustralia at the time of the 2109 fund raising that the company was gearing up for volume sales of its chips in 2020.
Morse Micro has strong WiFi credentials. Its VP engineering is professor Neil Weste, founder of Australian company Radiata, which produced the world’s first Wi-Fi 802.11a chip before being acquired by Cisco in 2000. VP standards is Dr Dave Goodall who also worked at Radiata and who was one of the original authors of the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard.
Big players slow to embrace HaLow
The HaLow standard was finalised in 2016. However to date HaLow seems to have attracted little interest from major players in the WiFi chip market. Our internet search found only Newracom, a fabless semiconductor company based in California, touting its HaLow chip technology.
A January 2019 report from Rethink Research, headed HaLow chips to launch at last, but the WiFi giants remain quiet, listed only Newracom, Morse Micro and three other startups developing HaLow chips.
De Nil suggested the big players were presently focussed on maintaining or growing their share of the current, massive market for WiFi chips and would enter the HaLow market once it starts to grow.
“There’s about four billion Wi Fi chips sold every year. I think a lot of the big guys are still very focused on how they make sure they don’t miss out on whatever market share they have those four billion. Wi Fi Halo is going to start relatively small but over the years is going to take up significant chunk of that four billion.”
