Oh this is incredible.. HaLow has been one of my favorite new wireless tech implementations, and I feel almost like a preacher with how much I have been pushing the gospel to the people around me for the last ~2 years. being introduced into the kernel should really help integration and usage. I am just hoping chips start being produced by more than one (?) company eventually for more market capture. Any thoughts on that front?
I'm not the expert in this area, but the current state of play AFAIK in terms of working chips is:
- Morse Micro
- Newracom
- Taixin are mostly not compliant (but cheap)
- Amazon have a proprietary not quite compatible HaLow in their Blink cameras
There's varying levels of interest in WFA compliance/interop. Morse and Newracom are the most interoperable, but even then there are gotchas.
The Morse ones, are, of course, the best ;)
Aside from upstreaming, one of the other things we're chasing is a better regulatory environment. In particular, the EU S1G bands are very tightly constrained.
It's low-energy like Bluetooth/Zwave/Zigbee, long range like any other 900Mhz Band protocol (LoRA does 10km or so in normal conditions, can go even further), but for when you need higher datarates. According to the Wikipedia chart it can max out at ~300 Mbps depending on modulation, though I don't know enough to speak to range/bandwidth tradeoffs, though I imagine there are.
Honestly seems pretty interesting. I had a lot of fun setting up a 4G carrier for my home so I can get decent speeds out on my back porch (5GHz can't cut through my ancient balloon frame walls/door, and 2.4GHz is a congested soup around me, useless), I wonder if I can wrangle some hardware together and start experimenting with this. Could be nice to get some remote SDR workloads off of 2.4GHz while still getting WPA3 encryption.
