The First Wi-Fi HaLow Global Summit Demonstrates the True Potential of Wi-Fi HaLow Technology

On April 28, 2025, I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote address to the first-ever Wi-Fi HaLow Global Summit, co-located with Wi-Fi World Congress USA 2025, organized by the Wi-Fi NOW Global team. During this presentation, I provided an overview of Wi-Fi HaLow technology, discussed the key use cases where Wi-Fi HaLow technology is best suited, and argued how Wi-Fi HaLow is now in a much better position thanks to continued technology innovation. It is now a rapidly expanding ecosystem from the chipset, module, and commercially-available device perspectives, with growing numbers of field trials and case studies. Regional consortia such as the AHPC in Japan are promoting the technology effectively, and there is a growing awareness of Wi-Fi HaLow technology. I also highlighted the enormous opportunity for both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi HaLow within Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and what still needs to be done to make the technology a true success in the years to come.

In addition to my keynote session, a number of speakers at the event demonstrated the growing potential for Wi-Fi HaLow across an extremely diverse number of applications. One of the leading Wi-Fi HaLow chipset providers, Morse Micro, demonstrated the unique value proposition of Wi-Fi HaLow technology in comparison to other long-range technologies such as LoRa, as well as its scalability across a number of different applications, in addition to the continued chipset innovation brought about by its latest MM8108 System-on-Chip (SoC).

Another leading chipset provider, Newracom, announced a new Wi-Fi HaLow chipset, the NRC5292, that has been heavily optimized for ultra-low power applications, operating at slightly shorter distances compared to conventional HaLow, but offering one of the lowest power chipsets on the market.

The Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new marketing program for Wi-Fi HaLow and highlighted the growing number of certified products for the technology. Vantron highlighted its growing number of Wi-Fi HaLow modules and other solutions, including a new camera reference design, as well as demonstrating the significant interest it was seeing in the technology. Gateworks and AsiaRF also both demonstrated the diversity of Wi-Fi HaLow across a range of consumer, enterprise, and industrial applications, including smart metering, smart agriculture, smart city, and a whole host of other applications that demonstrated the huge diversity of potential applications that HaLow can target.

Beyond these announcements, a key theme from my keynote and the wider discussion was how to build a successful Wi-Fi HaLow ecosystem. ABI Research provided the following recommendations on how Wi-Fi HaLow can build success:

• Continued Tech Innovation: As demonstrated with the recent Integrated Circuit (IC) developments, various vendors are continuing to reduce the power, offer enhanced range, develop smaller solutions, and increase the throughput of the technology. However, as Newracom highlighted, there may be some need to diversify on these metrics to enable even greater performance while trading off in other areas.
• Continue to Build the Ecosystem: While the event showed great progress in the HaLow ecosystem, the development of more and more tailored ICs, modules, Intellectual Property (IP), infrastructure equipment, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and partnerships with System Integrators (SIs) will be critical to the future acceleration of the technology.
• Speed Time to Market: The growing availability of reference designs, development kits, and pre-certified solutions, alongside enabling simplified development tools and fostering an open developer community, will be critical to helping accelerate the adoption of Wi-Fi HaLow.
• Create a Favorable Regulatory Environment: Uneven spectrum remains a challenge for sub-1 Gigahertz (GHz) Wi-Fi HaLow. Work is ongoing to increase the spectrum availability for Wi-Fi HaLow around the world, and various regions are currently exploring options for additional sub-1 GHz spectrum. In addition, to help combat any potential additional complexity of developing multiple Stock-Keeping Units (SKUs) per region, solution providers such as Morse Micro have developed modules that can offer flexible operation depending on the region where they are deployed.
• Combine with Other Technologies: Also important in the IoT space is collaboration and interoperability with alternative connectivity solutions. This can enable enhanced performance, reduce power consumption, deliver smaller device form factors, speed up time to market, enhance user experiences, and enable compelling and valuable new features such as positioning and sensing to differentiate from the competition. In addition to technologies such as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), Bluetooth®, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), 802.15.4, and others, this also applies to combinations with existing Wi-Fi technologies to help extend the range of traditional networks. As both technologies will be deployed in many IoT environments, the combination of both can raise the prospects for both.
• Awareness and Confidence: Given its relative immaturity, Wi-Fi HaLow is not yet a household name. Significant work still needs to be done to increase awareness of the technology and the benefits it can provide in relation to the competition. More effort also needs to go into showing how Wi-Fi HaLow is an extension of Wi-Fi technology into the sub-1 GHz band and not just another IoT technology adding complexity to an already crowded ecosystem
• Foster Additional Vertical-Level Partnerships: The Wi-Fi HaLow ecosystem should also look to foster additional vertical-level partnerships across different ecosystems to help accelerate adoption of the technology within the smart home, commercial building, industrial, and other key sectors that can benefit from the technology
• Promote Unique Differentiators Beyond Purely Technology: While the most commonly touted feature of Wi-Fi HaLow is its extended range, the ecosystem should continue to promote its other benefits, including high security, standards based, high scalability, ease of deployment, and the ability to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of IoT deployments. For example, in addition to requiring fewer Access Points (APs) than conventional Wi-Fi technologies, unlike other licensed wireless technologies for the IoT, Wi-Fi HaLow is an extension of Wi-Fi into the unlicensed sub-1 GHz bands. This Wi-Fi compatibility means there are no additional subscriptions or network charges to operate. These additional charges may be cost prohibitive in deployments of thousands of client devices, where the cost does not just extend to the hardware itself, but also to the number of devices or amount of traffic that is running on the network. Wi-Fi HaLow can, thus, help reduce both the upfront infrastructure costs and longer-term TCO of an IoT deployment. This can help maximize device and infrastructure Return on Investment (ROI), and simplify the procurement and deployment cycles.