It is a bummer that 802.11ah did not took of. This technology has a lot of potential and the implementation is pretty easy, also for ultra low power applicatons. But for some reason, no one is using this technology.
802.11ah has seemed to be a kind of weird in-between. It was made to be a compete in the LoRa type space but LoRa already provides cheaper to implement hardware that works significantly farther. It is indeed slower but for the target use case of intermittent low data IoT that's usually more than fine... or at least not solved often enough by the realistic throughputs of actually low powered 802.11ah devices to create a significantly larger market.
What I mean by actually low powered 802.11ah is most of the time people 347 Mb/s max speed, ignoring that's peak for for a 4x4 16 MHz channel. That's almost a different world, not even high performance laptop chips find 4x4 worth the power budget, let alone something built for IoT. If you go to the real IoT client hardware in a realistic use case of 1x1 8 MHz suddenly your realistic goodput of 10s of megabits per second but that doesn't really enable too many additional use cases and comes with the aforementioned loss of coverage area and efficiency (it's more efficient than normal Wi-Fi but it's still Wi-Fi based).
Take that into consideration and what you have is a bunch of people getting excited about high speed 900 MHz when the standard was actually designed around IoT use case and demand, losing out to competitors which do it better, cheaper, farther, and came first.
Related: There are bunch of other weird sub 1 GHz standards from 802, even some under 802.11. They tend to take advantage of the TV spectrum. I don't think any have been popular, partially because that's a more complicated spectrum to participate in.
zamadatix|2 years ago
What I mean by actually low powered 802.11ah is most of the time people 347 Mb/s max speed, ignoring that's peak for for a 4x4 16 MHz channel. That's almost a different world, not even high performance laptop chips find 4x4 worth the power budget, let alone something built for IoT. If you go to the real IoT client hardware in a realistic use case of 1x1 8 MHz suddenly your realistic goodput of 10s of megabits per second but that doesn't really enable too many additional use cases and comes with the aforementioned loss of coverage area and efficiency (it's more efficient than normal Wi-Fi but it's still Wi-Fi based).
Take that into consideration and what you have is a bunch of people getting excited about high speed 900 MHz when the standard was actually designed around IoT use case and demand, losing out to competitors which do it better, cheaper, farther, and came first.
Related: There are bunch of other weird sub 1 GHz standards from 802, even some under 802.11. They tend to take advantage of the TV spectrum. I don't think any have been popular, partially because that's a more complicated spectrum to participate in.