This forgotten Wi-Fi standard can reach nearly 10 miles, but it isn't for what you think

Published Oct 19, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Ismar is a Senior Author at How-To Geek. He previously worked as a writer, editor, and general manager at a content agency before joining the team in 2023. He began his writing career in 2021 after completing a BA in English Language and Literature. Beyond How-To Geek, Ismar has contributed to Red Stag Fulfillment and Authority Hacker. He has also worked on various SEO projects to help clients improve their search visibility. Ismar has been around Windows PCs since the age of three, so friends and family naturally chose him as the resident tech support. His projects often involve tinkering, such as disassembling mechanical keyboards and gaming mice to mod his beloved gear. He also enjoys pushing hardware to the max through overclocking while staying on a reasonable budget. An avid gamer, Ismar has logged thousands of hours across various genres, including first-person shooters, RPGs, racing games, and roguelites. When he is not at his desk, he is probably exploring other people’s phones to discover their quirks and features or experimenting with the latest AI tools. In his free time, Ismar enjoys spending time with his wife, working out at the gym, playing guitar and bass, cooking gourmet meals, and traveling. Above all else, he’s a proud cat owner. I don't know about you, but I feel like Wi-Fi hasn't fundamentally changed in years. New Wi-Fi standards are constantly improving throughput and efficiency, such as the introduction of the 6GHz band with Wi-Fi 6E, but why hasn't Wi-Fi evolved in the opposite direction, too? Why does my Wi-Fi signal drop the second I leave the house instead of remaining stable even a hundred yards away? As it turns out, steps have been taken in that direction in the form of Wi-Fi HaLow, a technology that you've probably never heard about. However, it's not intended for what you might think. Wi-Fi HaLow is a different kind of Wi-Fi built for massive range It's like your own private cell tower Wi-Fi HaLow (pronounced "halo") isn't some new technology that's set to premiere with Wi-Fi 8. It was formally published in 2017 under the IEEE 802.11ah wireless networking protocol, so it's already been around for almost a decade by this point. Instead of pushing for higher bandwidth at higher frequencies like 6GHz Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi HaLow uses sub-GHz spectrum (863–868MHz in Europe and 902–928MHz in the US, depending on local regulations), which has a significantly longer wavelength than 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. This generally means less available bandwidth, but the benefit is that these lower frequencies can travel much farther and penetrate through obstacles like thick brick walls, concrete floors, and foliage more effectively. Wi-Fi HaLow can connect devices miles away, but the range comes with trade-offs How far can it go? The most impressive part about Wi-Fi HaLow is its massive range. Morse Micro, a company that specializes in designing and manufacturing Wi-Fi HaLow chips, managed to maintain a live video call at a range of 1.8 miles (3km) with a 1Mbps connection in San Francisco's Ocean Beach neighborhood. It's an impressive result, especially when you consider the fact that it was done in a residential area. What's even more impressive is Morse Micro's next experiment: the company reported achieving 2Mbps of throughput at an extremely impressive range of 9.9 miles (15.9km) in Joshua Tree National Park. These two experiments are more of a showcase of the maximum potential of Wi-Fi HaLow rather than a realistic everyday scenario, but nevertheless, it's impressive. Although a throughput of 1Mbps is rather modest by modern standards, it was enough to maintain a choppy video call. That said, throughput alone doesn't tell us how high the ping is, so the latency could be unacceptably high. Still, it could be enough for a (slow) text chat. Of course, the closer you are to the router, the higher the throughput is generally going to be. In theory, a Wi-Fi HaLow connection could potentially be fast enough for tasks like basic web browsing and checking your email from a couple hundred feet away in the right conditions. Wi-Fi HaLow supports up to 8,191 devices The final boss of smart home networks Considering that many of us have generous mobile data plans and live in areas with decent cellular coverage, or at least have good Wi-Fi in and around the house thanks to things like Wi-Fi repeaters and mesh systems with wired backhaul, Wi-Fi HaLow's primary purpose isn't really to keep you connected at the corner of your block or even provide connectivity for your phone or laptop on the other side of your property. Even though the standard supports up to four spatial streams in some configurations, other solutions, like mesh Wi-Fi and repeaters with wired backhaul, are simply better suited to keeping general-purpose devices connected. Instead, Wi-Fi HaLow's long range and ability to support many connected devices make it best suited for IoT applications. It has several power-saving mechanisms that let compatible devices sleep for prolonged periods, only waking them when necessary. Wi-Fi HaLow works with things like cameras, but it's really best suited for devices that transmit small packets and do so infrequently, like switches, bulbs, sensors, and so on. Apart from the sub-GHz advantage, Wi-Fi HaLow supports channel widths as narrow as 1MHz, compared with the 20MHz channels typically used by conventional Wi-Fi. Narrower channels capture less total thermal noise, which can improve receiver sensitivity and help extend range, although they also limit throughput. Perhaps the most impressive and often-cited specification of Wi-Fi HaLow is its support for up to a whopping 8,191 devices on a single AP. You need to take that figure with a huge grain of salt, though, as it's a protocol-level association limit based on its 13-bit AID (Association Identifier) and hierarchical addressing system, not a guarantee that it can reliably serve that many active devices simultaneously. But even if the real figure is several times lower, just imagine the prospect of connecting hundreds of different sensors that collect and periodically report data back to you within a single private network. If you ran a 100-acre chicken farm, you could monitor every coop with temperature and motion sensors and still have room for those smart lights in your kitchen! Wi-Fi HaLow is appearing in more devices, but it still has a long way to go Widespread adoption remains critical If Wi-Fi HaLow is as good as it sounds, why haven't we seen more devices that support it? Unless you count specialized rugged phones like Kyocera's DuraForce EX2, there are practically no consumer-grade laptops, phones, or TVs that support Wi-Fi HaLow out of the box. You could add support with a USB adapter, but even those are primarily designed for developers rather than consumers. The same is true for the router side of things: most available HaLow hardware is still specialized equipment, such as combo gateways, access points, and bridge devices that connect HaLow devices to an existing network, rather than conventional home routers with built-in HaLow support. As with so many emerging technologies, it all boils down to the chicken-and-egg problem. There's little practical use for HaLow outside IoT, and most people don't want to invest in Wi-Fi HaLow IoT devices when other options are more affordable and beginner-friendly. Conventional Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Bluetooth Low Energy, and even the main long-range competitor, LoRaWAN, are all more established, more widespread, more affordable, or some combination of those factors. This makes it hard for Wi-Fi HaLow to break through. All hope is not lost, though. More devices and support are continuously coming to market, and a late 2024 prediction from ABI Research projected that we could see over 100 million Wi-Fi HaLow-enabled devices by 2029. It remains to be seen whether this prediction will turn out to be accurate. Wi-Fi HaLow needs more than just impressive range before it achieves mainstream adoption Unlike conventional Wi-Fi upgrades, Wi-Fi HaLow's primary goal isn't to let you browse Instagram in somebody else's neighborhood. It excels at connecting low-power IoT gadgets over long distances while still offering considerably more throughput than alternatives like LoRaWAN. For some setups, Wi-Fi HaLow offers just the right combination of range, power efficiency, and throughput to make other technologies less suitable. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will eventually become mainstream, with most routers and smart-home gadgets supporting it without a massive price premium.