
802.11ah Wi-Fi Standard Approved - sengork
http://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-halow
======
cjensen
Summary:

802.11ah: Better range, lower bandwidth

802.11ad: Better bandwidth. Doesn't go through walls.

802.11ax: Successor to 11ac expected in 2019

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donatj
5ghz AC doesn't go through my plaster walls now. I've got two walls between me
and my Airport Extreme and about 10 physical feet and have half signal showing
on my phone.

~~~
zombees
In this case, what they mean is that the signal will be truly line of light.
As you go up in frequency, radio starts to behave more like light so while you
may get some convenient reflections here and there, for the vast majority of
the time, if the antenna doesn't have a clear path to the transceiver, you
won't know there even is an access point.

~~~
digi_owl
I suspect this can be quite convenient for various places where you want to
limit access to individual rooms etc, but don't want to deal with the tangle
of cables and ports that a wired network would require.

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rgawdzik
Where do you keep up to date with the latest carrier/wifi/networking news?
(besides HN of course)

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adeptus
networkworld.com (click on the 3 bars icon, to the left of the NETWORK WORLD
text at the top, to view by category)

~~~
vive-la-liberte
[http://www.networkworld.com/](http://www.networkworld.com/) clickable link
because we're lazy like that

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Zenst
I see this is 900MHz, how will that fair in countries that utilise GSM900 as
that may certainly be a restriction in adoption for some countries due to
frequency clash, would it not?

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desdiv
GSM900 is 890-915 MHz; 802.11ah gets around this by using region specific
frequencies that sidestep GSM900:

902-928 MHz in the US (26 MHz bandwidth)

863-868 MHz in Europe (5 MHz bandwidth)

916.5-927.5 MHz in Japan (11 MHz bandwidth)

Limited bandwidth, especially in Europe, will to lead to both higher power
consumption and lower real-world range.

>The PHY layer will allow devices and APs to operate over different sub-1GHz
ISM bands, depending on the country regulations: 863-868 MHz in Europe,
902-928 MHz in the US, and 916.5-927.5 MHz in Japan. China, South Korea, and
Singapore also have specific channels.

Reference: [http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless-
infrastructure/sub-...](http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless-
infrastructure/sub-1ghz-wireless-the-low-power-wifi-solution/a/d-id/1315850)

~~~
ksec
I am assuming the new for more bandwidth is only required if you have many
information to transferred, which isn't likely the case here for 802.11ah?

~~~
lucaspiller
It also means they'll be less channels available, so more noise. These
frequencies are commonly used by things like door bells, burglar alarms,
garage door openers, car locks, etc. I'm more worried what the effect will be
on them.

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johnhenry
My main issue here is that each new wi-fi standard requires new hardware. I
remember reading something within the past few years about revolutionary new
wi-fi antennas that will be able to adapt to any frequency such that new
hardware wouldn't be an issue. I wonder if anyone has seen anything similar?

~~~
godzillabrennus
What do you expect from advanced radio equipment?

Each new hard drive standard has required a faster motherboard to take
advantage of it.

WiFi standards are backwards compatible in the sense that they work with older
hardware to send at the maximum speed that those radios were capable of
transmitting.

~~~
johnhenry
That's simply not true. Each standard doesn't require a faster motherboard,
only some changes to code and possibly a different communication frequency.
Changes to code do not require different hardware while changes to the
communication frequency do.

The crux of my initial comment is that it would be _awesome_ if we could some
how get around the last issue and not have to replace hardware in order to use
a different frequency, which @walshemj points out is a physical impossibility,
but I believe I read an article a while ago in which someone had gotten around
this?

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Havoc
Cool. I'd rather see a standard capable of carrying gigabit traffic. Sure
there is ac, but after noise & overheads it comes nowhere close.

So you've got people like me that can both get and afford gigabit but opt for
100mbps because the wireless tech isn't keeping up.

~~~
revelation
That's what 802.11ad is for, which can transmit over 60GHz (which limits it to
basically one room, as it's quite readily attenuated by even air).

That said, at 60GHz of course bandwidth is awesome. TP-Link has a router:

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/5/10721550/tp-link-talon-
ad72...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/5/10721550/tp-link-talon-
ad7200-router-ces-2016)

~~~
FireBeyond
At that router - LOL. "7gbps wireless throughput". Great. "1gbps ethernet
port"... err?

Assuming your device can support 802.11ad, too, of course.

~~~
Havoc
Thats actually OK. Advertised wifi speeds usually manage 20% of that in real
life so sounds about right.

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Mo3
Bullshit, your device is at fault and not the protocol. I bought a 802.11ac
dongle with external 10dbi gain antennas and have been enjoying _extreme_
speeds and connection strenght throughout the house, not to mention to the
routers of 30 of my neighbours.. And that's only 5GHz. For comparison, at my
desk three walls away I used to get about 40-50nW signal level off my built-in
adapter and antenna in my Lenovo laptop. With the new setup - 60mW... The
router sends at 100mW. We're talking pushing 90MB/s+ constantly no matter
where in the house with absolutely no connection drops.

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Havoc
>Bullshit

Well thats not nice.

Speeds will vary greatly depending on whether proprietary booster tech is in
use, which in turn will depend on the combination of hardware both on the
sending and receiving side.

oh and while we're on the topic of bullshit (seeing how you were so blunt to
go there) - signal levels are measured in decibels, not nW. nW is a measure of
power fed to the antenna. Your comment is about as plausible as someone
claiming their car is 40 gallons fast.

~~~
zaroth
RSSI -- Receive Signal Strength Indicator -- is reported in dBm, which is a
log-scale unit of watts. +20dBm is approx. the max transmit power for WiFi,
and equates to 100mW. 1nw is eqivalent to -60dBm which is a pretty decent
signal strength for WiFi, but won't provide max data rate. By comparison, the
minimum power to operate at 1Mbps is about -98dBm.

Then again, receiving at 60mw (+17dBm) would overdrive any of the WiFi devices
I ever tested and path loss of just 3dB (assuming +20dBm transmit power) is
not achievable over the air, even with a near-field antenna. Keep in mind many
devices actively tamper with the RSSI value reported up through NDIS, so while
it's possible for a card to report it is receiving at +17dBm, unless you have
hard-wired the hirose connectors between AP and STA it's not actually the
case. Nor would a receiver work very well with so little path loss in any
case, it would be completely over-driven.

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0x0
"Twice the range".. Is that a doubling of the radius or a doubling of the
diameter _(edit: oops, I meant area)_ of a ~ circle surrounding the access
point?

Am I being spoiled thinking either of those options aren't super impressive
for a whole new standard? Where's the 10x (order of magnitude) improvement?
Will it take 3-5 further complete iterations of incompatible standards? :)

~~~
ycmbntrthrwaway
As usual with Wi-Fi you won't get close to theoretical range and distance in
practice. 802.11ah includes support for relay access points [1]. Most probably
it is a requirement for "nearly doubled range".

> Am I being spoiled thinking either of those options aren't super impressive
> for a whole new standard? Where's the 10x (order of magnitude) improvement?

802.11ah is not the "mainline" standard. 10x improvement is left for 802.11ax.
802.11ah is for IoT applications: low bandwidth, low power consumption, high
distance.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah#Relay_Access_Poi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah#Relay_Access_Point_.28AP.29)

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revelation
Where is it? Can I read it? All I'm seeing is a press release linking to other
articles that are mere low-effort copies of the same press release.

Also, previous discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10838973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10838973)

~~~
sengork
Cheers, I didn't find that one when I searched.

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carlisle_
At 900Mhz I imagine there will be lots of interference problems, or is there
something I'm missing?

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structAnkit
I don't believe we really use cordless phones in the 900MHz anymore and I
believe the consortiums determine which spectrums are sufficiently unused
before targeting them.

Verizon and T-Mobile have some LTE spectrum in the 700MHz range for building
penetration and range so I expect to see great things at the 900MHz range for
lower power devices.

~~~
revelation
They say 900MHz but that's really just a rough ballpark, presumably it will
use the 915MHz ISM band in America and 868MHz in Europe.

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leaveyou
I recently bought an 802.11ac wifi adapter promising a nice theoretical 600Mbs
in the 5Ghz band and all I was able to get from it was a practical 65-70Mbs
(at 2 meters from an 802.11ac router) using the best drivers under Windows.
Under Linux the (5Ghz)AC mode didn't work (buggy driver; no vendor support) so
I was back in 802.11n mode. Quite underwhelming after spending 200 euros on
router and adapter. I will definitely not "early adopt" wifi 802.11ah whenever
it appears..

~~~
ghshephard
If you get a reasonably good combination of hardware/drivers, 802.11ac works
well. I'm able to get 407.99 Mb/s Down, 462.39 Mb/s Up on a 2012 Macbook Air +
RT-AC87U WiFi Hotspot on 5 Ghz to speedtest.net in Singapore.

~~~
pmjordan
I can confirm similar local measurements with MacBook Pros and a D-Link
DAP-2950 across a room with a wood partition blocking line of sight. If the AP
is advertised as 600Mbit/s, chances are it only supports 1 or 2 streams (MIMO
antennas) per band. Most laptops only have 2, but even so the signal quality
will be much better wih a 3- or 4- way MIMO setup on the AP end. (The D-Link
has 6 antennas, so 3-way MIMO for both 5GHz and 2.4.) In addition to number of
antennas, orientation also makes a big difference.

Finally, wireless access points seem to be one of those things where quality
varies a lot. I hated wifi for its unreliability until I bought a decent
(professional/small-to-medium-business grade) AP 8 months ago. Not a single
connection problem since, even with the notoriously affected Mac hardware and
OSX software versions.

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ChuckMcM
I wonder if its too late though, perhaps the licensing is easier than Zigbee?

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jmgrosen
How does this compare to 802.15.4? It seems like the two have similar
purposes.

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andreapaiola
Isn't often better powerline than WiFi through walls?

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dghughes
How will IPv6 affect all these new wireless standards/specs? Going from small
to huge frame sizes must have a significant effect on performance.

~~~
legulere
IPv6 Has nothing to do with frame sizes (except that too large packets now get
dropped instead of being fragmented into two parts)

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geofft
IPv4 lets the MTU get as low as 68 (but you're only sending 8 bytes of data
per packet); IPv6 prevents it from getting any lower than 1280, but permits
"link-specific fragmentation and reassembly" as long as IPv6 itself doesn't
see any smaller fragments.

IPv6 also permits (but does not require) jumbograms that make full use of the
32-bit packet size field, but across a wireless link, having to retransmit 4
GB at a time seems like a bad plan... this only seems useful for short-
distance wired connections among hosts that know they've got a quality cable
between them.

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ridgeguy
When can I buy wireless headphones based on this standard? I hate the short
range of 2.54 and 5 GHz headphones.

~~~
geofft
The 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz audio protocols seem to not be wifi-based. (Which
makes sense, you don't want them to be IP-based.) They just transmit
uncompressed analog audio over probably something like FM.

900 MHz headphones seem to be readily available, and to have been readily
available for years.

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SquareWheel
Really? Does this mean a radio tuned to the right channel would be able to
play the audio stream?

~~~
dogma1138
No they don't use simple radio, all of them will use a packet based protocol
either proprietary or some sort of a standard digital (audio) streaming
protocol. Encoding and packets don't add up any substantial latency just look
Bluetooth A2DP headsets and AirPlay speakers (which uses Wifi as a carrier)
headsets.

If your headsets did use just normal 2.4ghz radio like say a basic walkie
talkie the downside is that you would've been able to hear any other
transmission on that band e.g. an old baby monitor(new ones are digital too).

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sengork
Also to note is that a potential hacker doesn't need to be within the visible
range of the home WiFi network with the increase in coverage.

~~~
hueving
That's already the case with directional antennas.

