Australian-designed low-energy Wi-Fi chips are set to power a new generation of smart devices which can talk across neighbourhoods and run for years on a single battery.
Based in Cisco's Sydney Innovation Centre, Australian start-up Morse Micro has built a prototype wireless chip based on the newly-ratified 802.11ah standard.
Wi-Fi HaLow — pronounced "halo" — reaches up to one kilometre yet demands only one per cent of the power consumed by traditional Wi-Fi chips.
Cisco will produce the first equipment based on Morse Micro's HaLow chips, which is expected to hit the shelves in 18 months. HaLow-enabled devices will initially focus on industrial and agricultural applications but will also find their way into smart cities and eventual smart homes by 2020, says Morse Micro co-founder Andrew Terry.
"Wi-Fi HaLow's extended range means that at home you'll be able to reliably connect devices anywhere in your house — or even outside in the back garden, garage or driveway — without the coverage hassles of today's typical home Wi-Fi networks," Mr Terry says.
"Meanwhile HaLow's low power requirements will allow for battery lives measured in months rather than hours, along with the potential for devices to run on harvested energy like solar."
Wi-Fi HaLow operates on the unlicensed 915 MHz band, avoiding the 900 MHz spectrum allocated to mobile broadband networks, and offers data speeds of around 10 megabits per second. It sacrifices the higher speeds of traditional Wi-Fi standards in favour of power efficiency, reach and the ability to penetrate buildings, similar to mobile phone signals.
HaLow chips will also be five times smaller and cheaper than traditional Wi-Fi chips, making the technology a good fit for smart appliances. HaLow devices can also conserve power by periodically waking and reporting back to base, allowing for energy-efficient wide area sensor networks.
Within the home, HaLow's long range will deliver an advantage over rival smarthome wireless protocols such as Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee and Z-Wave while still offering faster data speeds. As HaLow is based on the 802.11 wireless standard it is compatible with established encryption protocols and can be easily built into home Wi-Fi gateways, whereas alternative wireless protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy rely on a smartphone or standalone hub to connect to other household devices and the internet.
For compatibility reasons smart home device makers often use Wi-Fi as their de facto wireless protocol of choice, despite its restrictive energy demands, but soon Wi-Fi HaLow will offer the best of both worlds within the home, says fellow Morse Micro co-founder Michael De Nil.
"By 2020 we envision HaLow being built into home Wi-Fi routers so every wireless device in the house can easily interact without the need for hubs and bridges," De Nil says.
"HaLow can help mend the fragmented smarthome ecosystem and make it easier for smart things to get along with each other."
Having both worked for networking chip giant Broadcom, Terry and De Nil founded Morse Micro last year to forge ahead with the development of an Australian Wi-Fi HaLow chip. They've received plenty of local support along the way; Morse Micro is a graduate of the start-up accelerator program Startmate and has received Federal government commercialisation grants. It is also supported by Innovation Central at Australian Technology Park which is backed by Cisco, CSIRO and others.
Mr Terry and Mr De Nil are joined at Morse Micro by Prof Neil Weste and Dr Dave Goodall, founder and design engineer respectively of pioneering 1990s Australian start-up Radiata Networks. At Radiata they helped produce the world's first 802.11a Wi-Fi chip, based on technology originally developed by CSIRO's radio astronomy division. CSIRO's long-running patent battle with US technology giants over Wi-Fi eventually brought in around $500 million in licensing fees and payments.
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