900Mhz Long Range WiFi (HaLow)

One of the most common complaint on WiFi is the range is often not sufficient. You have this door bell / camera by the property gate which does not connect or a thermostat in the basement. WiFi mesh systems help solving some of these problems (while introducing others), but in some situations you simply need more per-hop range.

In commercial / industrial environments, such as served by Bluetooth mesh / Bluetooth NLC networks this is rarely an issue (Bluetooth can reach really far if properly configured), home users would clearly benefit from something like long range WiFi. If it existed.

And actually it does exist. The standard is called 802.11ah (or HaLow) and is a long range WiFi standard, operating in the sub-GHz frequency band.

Lower frequency comes will much lower throughput, but it has the benefit of lower attenuation. In short - it passes through more walls or goes longer distance. As this is a different radio frequency, none of your laptops of smartphones are able to connect to it directly, but some dedicated devices could.

One of the companies pioneering the HaLow is Anjielo Smart. They offer several interesting products and I have recently had a chance to test one of them - the AH WiFi HaLow Extender. It is a set: one device (the logical "transmitter") you plug in to your LAN network (or anything that has Internet connectivity), the other device (the logical "receiver") is a regular WiFi access point which links to the first device over HaLow. 

The link speed is slow (in today's terms) - around 10Mbps in good conditions and falls to 1-2Mbps at the edge of the range. But the range is good. In my non-scientific tests the link was still maintained when I went around 500m from the base. This very often may be the critical link impossible to achieve otherwise. Also the receiving device can be powered from a power bank, so can this way be entirely portable.

The only downside (unfortunately, and again!) is that despite adopting the USB-C charging connectors they failed to implement proper USB-PD signaling (even the simplest 5.1kΩ resistors), so USB-A - to - USB-C cables must be used. The 5.1kΩ resistors are proving to be the biggest USB-C fail.