In the age of the Internet, Wi-Fi is as ubiquitous as the oxygen in our lives. It is the most widely used wireless network transmission protocol today, carrying more than half of the world's traffic, and Wi-Fi is an all-encompassing term used to describe the evolving 802.11 family of protocols.
And the Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization driving the development of Wi-Fi, has simplified Wi-Fi names through numerical nomenclature, such as Wi-Fi 6 corresponding to 802.11ax, Wi-Fi 5 for 802.11ac, and Wi-Fi 4 for 802.11n.
The arrival of 5G opens up the era of the Internet of Everything, like autonomous driving, smart city, remote medical care, smart wearable, etc., are all application scenarios for IoT. In order to better meet the needs of this type of market, the Wi-Fi Alliance has launched the Wi-Fi HaLow certification program, which offers a wider coverage distance and lower power consumption.
Wi-Fi HaLow is a certification standard based on IEEE 802.11ah technology, and is also a low-power Wi-Fi technology tailored for the IoT market.
As we all know, low-power transmission standards for IoT also include ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, and Thread. the drawbacks of ZigBee and Z-Wave are the lower bandwidths, and both are less resilient when it comes to setup. ZigBee, for example, is not capable of frequency hopping, which makes it susceptible to interference during network deployment. Therefore, ZigBee is not suitable for IoT or M2M applications (industry-specific terminals) where the RF environment is unstable. And Wi-Fi HaLow connects up to more than 8,000 devices on a single node, while also providing a certain level of interference immunity and wall penetration.
As for Bluetooth, its drawback is the communication distance, which is usually no more than 10 meters. And Wi-Fi HaLow has a maximum transmission distance of 1000 meters.
As a kind of long-distance wireless transmission technology, Wi-Fi HaLow's low-power consumption and long-distance characteristics, in addition to being suitable for industrial IoT, drones, security monitoring and other fields, can also be used for smart wearable devices.
Currently, mainstream smart wearables can be broadly categorized into three main types: TWS, smart watches, and smart glasses. First is TWS, and before consumers buy TWS headphones, they usually care more about the sound quality, noise reduction, and battery life of the headphones.
For better portability, TWS headphones are basically made smaller, about the size of a thumb. With the limited size, TWS headphones need to cram a lot of components inside, including audio units, noise canceling chips, batteries, and so on.
Now, the vast majority of TWS headphones on the market, single use time can basically reach 5~8 hours. To further improve the battery life of TWS headphones, manufacturers have two approaches: one is to increase the battery capacity; the other is to introduce fast charging technology.
Although it is not difficult to increase the battery capacity, there are many problems with this simple and brutal method, such as with the increase in battery capacity, the volume of the battery will also increase, which will make the headset cavity part will also become larger and heavier, not only sacrificing some of the portability attributes, but also affecting the wearing comfort of the headset. Moreover, adding more features to the TWS will also speed up battery consumption.
As for the introduction of fast charging technology, it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem of the TWS headset's battery life, as users need to put the headset into the charging case and wait for 5 minutes before continuing to use it for 1 hour. And the Wi-Fi HaLow low-power feature helps improve the battery life of the TWS headphones, and while it's not hard to bring a qualitative improvement, it's at least a little better than before.
The next step is smartwatches.
The Apple Watch, for example, can operate independently of a cell phone through the e-SIM function, and has a dedicated app store where users can download apps according to their needs, which are inseparable from mobile cellular data and Wi-Fi.
The biggest bottleneck of traditional Wi-Fi is power consumption. HaLow's power consumption performance, due to the use of 700 ~ 900 lower frequency, as well as a narrower channel occupation width, so that the power consumption and Bluetooth, ZigBee and other short-range wireless transmission technology is on the same level.
In other words, whether you're downloading and installing apps or using an app that requires internet access for a long period of time, smartwatches that support the Wi-Fi HaLow standard will consume less power, which corresponds to an increase in battery life.
Finally, smart glasses.
Now, the more common smart glasses on the market have two types of home or outdoor use, the former is mainly used for audio-visual entertainment, such as watching movies, playing games, etc.; the latter is more inclined to make phone calls and listen to songs.
In addition to low power consumption, Wi-Fi HaLow also supports long distance transmission, multi-device connectivity, better wall penetration, and stronger anti-interference. For home-based smart glasses, if the router is located in the living room, the WiFi connectivity will deteriorate when you use it in the room. Plus if you're not the only one in the house and the router doesn't support Wi-Fi 6, using smart glasses may affect the user experience due to network congestion issues. If home-based smart glasses support the Wi-Fi HaLow standard, all of these issues might be solved.
For outdoor smart glasses like Huawei's Eyewear, the biggest problem is the stability of the network connection. As an example, when using outdoor smart glasses to listen to music in an application scenario where the signal is complex, such as the subway or public transportation, you may be subjected to interference from outside signals, resulting in the device being disconnected more often than not. Compared to traditional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, Wi-Fi HaLow has a much stronger signal anti-interference capability, which can significantly reduce the interfering nature of external signals on smart glasses.
In fact, compared to smart wearables, Wi-Fi HaLow is more useful in laying out the AIoT market. For example, smart security, due to Wi-Fi HaLow maximum transmission distance of 1,000 meters, and support for up to 10,000 devices at the same time access to the same connection point, large shopping malls only need to build a Wi-Fi HaLow access point in one location, you can cover all the monitoring cameras within one kilometer to support the standard. For merchants, the layout of security monitoring will cost less.
And Wi-Fi HaLow helps to improve the smart home experience. At this stage of the smart home, the experience is not very good, either often disconnected, or by other devices in the home signal interference, resulting in the actual use of high latency. If a smart home supports the Wi-Fi HaLow standard, these issues may be resolved.
In fact, Wi-Fi HaLow is not a new technology, as early as 2016, the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced this standard, just no manufacturers are willing to follow, until 2020, the domestic Zhuhai Taixin Semiconductor launched the world's first production chip based on the Wi-Fi Halow standard. But the application scenario is not much connected to the average consumer.
To be honest, Wi-Fi HaLow in terms of positioning, and Wi-Fi 6 more or less overlap, after all, the indoor application scenarios, the difference is not big. In contrast, Wi-Fi HaLow is more suitable for outdoor scenarios. Obviously, the Wi-Fi Alliance made the right decision to announce the standard again at this point in time.
However, given the previous progression of the standard from announcement to chip mass production to commercialization, vendors may not have followed through and launched products as much as they should have. Although there are a few vendors who have joined the Wi-Fi Alliance, including upstream chip makers Intel, Qualcomm, etc., and downstream terminal brand vendors including Microsoft, Apple, Huawei, etc., whether the Wi-Fi HaLow standard will be applied to the smart wearable space will ultimately depend on whether the vendors are willing to do it or not, after all, there has been a "lesson learned! "
The Wi-Fi HaLow standard will be applied to smart wearables.