WiFi Alliance Announces WiFi HaLow

[phoronix]

Phoronix: WiFi Alliance Announces WiFi HaLow

The WiFi Alliance has announced the new HaLow technology in preparation for this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES)...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WiFi-HaLow-Announced

[Shaman666]

Terrible idea. 900Mhz is used for many long range devices - because of severe interference problems, they have more or less stopped selling it into outdoor phone markets and it is implemented at many "smart meter" deployments. There's a tiny amount of spectrum available. All this will do is further pollute the 900Mhz spectrum. And surely some know-it-all dweeb will plumb in a 1W power booster and next thing you know, you can sniff his packets 15 miles away when you discover that interference is preventing you from using your new HaLow router.

[Spazturtle]

If somebody uses a 1W booster then that devices battery will run out very quickly. This is designed for IoT devices.

[zanny]

Terrible idea. 900Mhz is used for many long range devices - because of severe interference problems, they have more or less stopped selling it into outdoor phone markets and it is implemented at many "smart meter" deployments. There's a tiny amount of spectrum available. All this will do is further pollute the 900Mhz spectrum. And surely some know-it-all dweeb will plumb in a 1W power booster and next thing you know, you can sniff his packets 15 miles away when you discover that interference is preventing you from using your new HaLow router.

What do you expect? All the good non-private spectrum has been saturated since 1992. Until the US fed starts making sense and starts revoking vast amounts of private ownership of radio waves you will have this kind of extreme interference on the open bands because there are so few of them.

[duby229]

See and for the last 6 years I had been expecting something like this in the 700mhz spectrum. A lower band option is a great idea, but 900mhz is really saturated in places with moderate populations.

EDIT: Buy an RC car and it'll at least twitch the steering wheels or shimmy the drive motor due from interference. So yeah, at least for consumer products 900mhz has been screwed up for years and years.

[q2dg]

Do you know if this technology is a technical competitor of LoRa? o maybe XBee? Or maybe BLE? I'm really lost

[tuke81]

900MHz is for E-GSM band in europe, i.e. 21Mbps 3G in Finland is on that frequency(ITU-T standard). So I can't see you can sell these equipment to Europe at all with that frequency. Will there be another silly region limited chips like there is in mobile phone area...

[tuuker]

Finally a longer range for direct links i hope, good for making direct LAN for voice chat or something else that can work with lower bandwidth. Maybe even build some similar mesh network like police TETRA has. Say no to operators tyranny.

[SystemCrasher]

I wonder what they're going to do about GSM, heavily using 900MHz band in many places around the globe.

[pal666]

900Mhz is used for many long range devices - because of severe interference problems

2.4ghz is used by many computer devices, what do you propose?