So what is wrong with WiFi?

WiFi has been a brilliant success story. CSIRO invention, near ubiquitous uptake for commercial and private use and a daily part of our lives. But it does have some drawbacks:

• high power consumption for battery based systems
• range, especially with walls or trees in the way
• increasing numbers of devices that want to be simultaneously connected

As a result, larger campuses and buildings need networked access points to deal with the range issue and battery powered devices need regular charging, such as your phone and definitely IoT sensors.

Some common problems that are difficult to address are:

• Video surveillance cameras at the edge of WiFi range (or beyond)
• Larger blocks or rural areas wanting connectivity with range
• Higher volumes of data than you can get with long range, low power, wide area networks (LPWAN) such as LoRa
• The costs of going cellular with SIM charges
• High densities of devices wanting to connect such as factories of the future Industry 4.0 or IoT rich environments

A better WiFi formula

This problem was recognised by Wi-iFi.org in 2016 and they published a new standard for WiFi HaLow which uses low frequency ISM band communications to address many of these issues. Part of the problem though is the use of WiFi in the name which immediately makes people think of conventional WiFi and skip over the differences. So I really believe we should just call it HaLow.

The features are:

• long range – 1Km or even more
• much better penetration through walls
• supports operation from a coin cell for months or more!
• standardised gateways

morse micro

morse micro Mu

And best of all, there is an Australia semiconductor design company, morse micro, that are a leading company in this space Internationally. That’s right, they are designing custom semiconductors here in Australia. What inspired this post was a conversation today with Andrew Walla, former specialist RF engineer who worked for us part time during his PhD, and Andy McFarlane of morse micro, who was letting me know about the second generation chip, the MM8108, they have developed with lower power consumption and better data throughput. Andrew Walla has joined morse micro  and knew we would be interested in this new development.

morse micro HaLow IC

So if you need much better range and connectivity than standard WiFi (like 10x+) and also much better data throughput than LoRa (like 1000x+) then HaLow could be the answer.

If this is you, then we would love to help you by designing a product based on Australia Technology that you can make profitably in Australia.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design, Embedded Software Development and Electronics Manufacturing, focusing on products that are intended to be profitably Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 40 years.

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