802.11ah

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments on Newracom NRC6101 802.11ah WiFi SoC Promises up to 1 km Range for Smart Grid and Automation

Newracom NRC6101 802.11ah WiFi SoC Promises up to 1 km Range for Smart Grid and Automation

802.11ah is a new WiFi standard operating in the 900 MHz range that targets low power & long range connectivity, as required by many IoT & M2M applications. According to this low power WAN standards comparison table, 802.11ah also supports up 1km range outdoor, 150 Kbps to 346 Mbps transfer rates, up 8191 clients per access points,  and a 2016 launch is planned. However, I had not seen any implementations based on the new standard, except a demonstration by Antcor on a DSP in 2014. A Korean startup, Newracom, may however soon launch the first 802.11ah chip with NRC6101 SoC. I was tipped about this new solution via a Korean website, where I got the picture above from, but there’s no information about NRC6101 on the web, except for a small mention on Wikidevi.com redirecting to the product page, where NRC6101 name is not even mentioned, but with some specifications […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Comparison Table of Low Power WAN Standards for Industrial Applications

Comparison Table of Low Power WAN Standards for Industrial Applications

WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee are commonly found in consumer devices part of the “IoT ecosystem”, but the range, cost, power consumption, and/or scalability of these wireless standards are not suitable. For example, agricultural and forestry applications normally require long distance, and smart parking or city lighting may requires scalability to a great number of nodes, so alternatives are needed. EDN wrote a thorough article comparing 10 alternative wireless standards: Weightless-W, Weightless-N, Weightless-P, SigFox, LoRaWAN, LTE-Cat M, IEEE P802.11ah, Dash7, Ingenu RPMA, and nWave. The table includes the frequency band, channel width, range, transmit power, packet size (minimal or maximal), downlink and uplink data rates, maximum number of connected devices, topology, roaming capability, and status. If you had to implement something today, four to five solutions are “in deployment”: SigFox, Ingenu RPMA, nWave, LoRa, and possibly Dash7, while the other are only starting to get deployed, or will be finalized in […]

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