Does Wi-Fi HaLow Have a Future?

802.11ah, also known as Wi-Fi HaLow, is sub-1 GHz Wi-Fi technology designed to better support Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The technology offers a number of considerable technical advantages over alternative Wi-Fi and wireless technologies, including lower power consumption, a longer range (up to 1 km), support for up to 8,000 stations, variable and higher data rates (150 Kbps up to 78 Mbps per spatial stream), reduced interference, and single hop connectivity. HaLow is therefore well-suited to a number of IoT vertical markets including the smart home, industrial sensor networks, asset management, retail, video surveillance, smart cities, building automation, and connected agriculture, among others. However, while the standard was ratified in 2016, since then it has received very limited attention from chipset designers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) alike. Three years later, as HaLow chipsets and Intellectual Property (IP) are finally hitting the market, ABI Research asks, does Wi-Fi HaLow have a future?

HaLow chipsets and IP are finally coming to the market in 2019 thanks to efforts from startups such as NEWRACOM, Morse Micro, Palma Ceia SemiDesign, and others. The following are the most notable recent developments within this space:

• Korean startup NEWRACOM is currently the only company with a commercial HaLow chip, the NRC7292. This chipset supports 1, 2, and 4 MHz channel bandwidths with a data rate ranging from 150 Kbps to 15 Mbps, meaning it is able to support applications ranging from low-power sensor devices to more throughput-heavy video surveillance. In March 2019, the company partnered with Taiwanese IoT solution provider AdvanWISE to introduce the world’s first HaLow gateway. AdvanWISE has deployed several HaLow products with this SoC, including the world's first tri-band Industrial Gateway, HaLow AP/Station, and HaLow module for various IoT applications. In May 2019, NEWRACOM announced a partnership with Japanese IoT solution provider BeatCraft to help speed up the deployment of connected agriculture applications. In addition, in June 2019, NEWRACOM and Fortune Tech System announced the launch of a new integrated and miniaturized HaLow solution that incorporates Raspberry Pi 3 and targets various IoT applications. NEWRACOM is also widely reported to have shipped a HaLow IC into a Korea Telecom gateway.
• Sydney-based startup Morse Micro recently raised US$17 million in Series A funding. The company’s 802.11ah chips are now available for customer sampling in Chinese markets, and are expected to move into volume production before the end of the year. In the United States and Europe, this is expected to take until 2020 or 2021 at the earliest.
• Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Methods2Business, US based Adapt-IP, and US based Palma Ceia Semi are also working on HaLow IP and chipsets. A number of these companies are anticipated to begin sampling 802.11ah chips throughout 2019.
• Qualcomm, which backed the technology early on, still views HaLow as an area of interest due to its inherent technical strengths, but is not heavily investing due to weak demand and smaller interest than it had previously envisioned. However, Qualcomm is following the evolution closely. 

At this time there are still virtually no products shipping with HaLow chips, though this is expected to change considerably over the next couple of years. Some of these emerging startups are bullish on the prospects of 802.11ah and claim to have early contracts with some large manufacturers, likely stretching into multiple millions of units. Many 802.11ah vendors have mentioned China as by far the biggest supporter of the technology. It is likely that any scalable deployments will initially be found in this market as an alternative to Low-Power Wide Area (LPWA) and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) technologies.

As ABI Research argued long before the standard arrived, despite the inherent advantages of the technology, HaLow faces a difficult challenge in creating a new sub-1GHz Wi-Fi ecosystem. Whereas other Wi-Fi standards, such as 802.11ac and 802.11ax, are backward-compatible with existing 802.11a/b/g/n routers, 802.11ah-enabled products will require a separate gateway or new access point with an 802.11ah radio. This brings about the chicken and egg dilemma when it comes to new technologies: Access Point (AP)vendors may be hesitant to include the technology when there are few products that can take advantage of it, while IoT device designers will be hesitant to adopt the technology when very few gateways or AP devices support the it. Instead, they may choose to go with alternative solutions such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, LPWA, NB-IoT, or even 802.11n and 802.11ax.

In addition, from a Wi-Fi resource perspective, HaLow arrived at a time when resources were beginning to be shifted toward Wi-Fi 6 development. Some have argued that Wi-Fi chipset vendors may show more interest now that this is out of the way, though, as it stands, most of the industry is taking a wait-and-see approach to HaLow. Wi-Fi 6 has also introduced some key IoT features such as extended range and Target Wake Time (TWT) while being able to take advantage of the existing ecosystem. Wi-Fi 6 networking infrastructure will roll out much more rapidly than that of 802.11ah. In addition, 6GHz Wi-Fi is likely to take up significant investment resources over the next few years compared to investments that will be made in HaLow. The following challenges also continue to inhibit HaLow adoption:

Regional Variations: The move to the S1G spectrum has meant that 802.11ah will not be available worldwide and will instead need to be tailored to individual markets, adding to the cost and complexity that traditional Wi-Fi and other competing solutions have avoided.

New Infrastructure Requirements: 802.11ah will require new infrastructure and access points to be developed in order for it to take hold. The diffusion of separate gateways, dongles, multi-band routers, and wide area infrastructure will not be an easy process. There may also be increased hesitation to spend on this due to the regional limitations of the S1G spectrum.

Competition: A number of other technologies with similar features at equivalent price points are already on the market, proven, and gaining momentum. Other emerging wireless technologies such as LPWAN, Wi-Fi 6, and NB-IoT could limit these opportunities further.

Time to Market (TTM) and Maturity: 802.11ah is already very late to the low-power wireless connectivity party. Other competing IoT technologies such as 802.15.4, Bluetooth, LPWA, NB-IoT, and even 802.11n and 802.11ax are already carving out success across the IoT.

Cost: Keeping the cost down within scalable IoT deployments is critical. By the time 802.11ah is widely available, it is still likely to be more expensive than competing technologies with similar functionalities. It is therefore difficult to establish the extra value proposition of 802.11ah versus very competent competing technologies, particularly in the low-power Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) use case. However, just like traditional Wi-Fi, HaLow prices will come down, though it will be critical to reach the US$1-$2 price points as soon as possible if the technology is to scale.

Ultimately, ABI Research expects that HaLow will be able to carve out some success across various IoT applications in addition to gaining penetration in Wi-Fi access points and, ultimately, smart home devices, due to its inherent technical strengths such as long range, low cost, and low power consumption. However, it is likely to take some time for the technology to scale up as awareness spreads, more ICs become widely available, chipset prices fall, and a wider installed base builds in APs and gateway devices. While the technology has a strong technical foundation, it needs to build market presence and an ecosystem sooner rather than later or it risks losing out to other competing technologies. In many ways, the technology is somewhat squeezed between 802.11ax IoT devices and LPWA/NB-IoT technologies. ABI Research believes that HaLow will gain more traction in more scalable IoT deployments, such as connected agriculture, building automation, or industrial deployments, than in the consumer or smart home markets. HaLow vendors should heavily promote the potential interference, robustness, scalability, range, and flexibility benefits that their technology can provide compared to alternative wireless technologies to help drive success in the next 12 to 18 months. Much work will need to be done to promote the technology, as industry awareness around Wi-Fi HaLow is still lagging behind the competition in both the Short-Range Wireless (SRW) and LPWA space.