802.11ah / Wi-Fi HaLow · Pre-production
A ruggedized sub-1 GHz access point built for outdoor industrial deployment: about 1 km of coverage, 1,000+ battery-powered endpoints per unit, PoE powered, -40 °C to +85 °C, designed and manufactured in the United States — and engineered from the start for Class I Division 2 areas.
Status: pre-production hardware. Certifications listed on this page as "in certification" or "targeted" have not been issued. No certification mark is claimed.
01 — The gap
SCADA, PLCs and IIoT sensors all speak IP. Getting IP to a wellhead 4 miles down a lease road, or to 400 soil probes on a 5,000-acre farm, currently means one of three bills: trenching fiber at highway-project prices, paying a monthly line per device on cellular across thousands of endpoints, or leasing satellite bandwidth by the gigabyte.
All three are expensive to install and expensive to keep alive across hundreds of square miles of remote land — and two of them put a battery or a solar panel maintenance visit behind every single sensor.
The alternative
200+
acres covered by one access point
1,000+
associated endpoints, on batteries that last years between site visits
$0
recurring per-device airtime cost on your own spectrum-license-free network
02 — How HaLow works, and what it costs you
802.11ah runs in the 902–928 MHz ISM band in the US. Lower frequency means lower path loss and better penetration through terrain, crop canopy, steel structures and tank farms than 2.4 or 5 GHz. Narrow channels — 1, 2, 4 and 8 MHz — concentrate the same transmit power into less spectrum, which is why a link closes at a kilometer instead of a hundred meters.
It is still Wi-Fi: standard IP, standard WPA3, standard tooling. Your sensor gets a DHCP address and talks Modbus TCP or MQTT like anything else on the network.
Honest tradeoff
03 — Why this access point
Engineered to Class I Division 2 / UL 121201 requirements for wellhead, tank battery and compressor-station mounting. Certification is in progress — we will publish the file number and listing the day it is issued, and not before.
Board design, firmware and final assembly in the United States. Intended for TAA-compliant procurement and Section 889 clean bills of materials. Component-level country-of-origin documentation provided on request.
OpenWrt-based. Full root over SSH, standard package management, no license keys, no cloud dependency, no subscription required to read your own sensors. Build and flash your own image if you prefer.
Published schematics and board files, documented connectors and part numbers, field-replaceable modules. Gasketed and bolted enclosure — no adhesive, no destructive disassembly.
Radio, compute and I/O are separate cards on a documented internal bus. Swap the radio module for a new band plan or a newer HaLow silicon revision without pulling the deployed unit off the mast.
04 — Specifications
Preliminary datasheet · Rev C · Values subject to change before production release
05 — Where it gets deployed
Pump-off controllers, tank level, pressure and flow transmitters, and RTU serial gateways reporting back to SCADA over a single AP at the tank battery instead of a cell modem per pad.
Soil moisture probes, weather stations, pivot and valve controllers, grain bin sensors and equipment trackers across a section of land, backhauled from one mast at the shop.
Pipeline cathodic protection, valve stations, water districts, mine sites and substations — anywhere fiber trenching and satellite bandwidth are the only quotes on the table.
06 — Against the other quotes on your desk
| Criterion | HaLow AP | Cellular per device | Satellite | Trenched fiber |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Install cost across 200 acres | One mast, one PoE drop | Modem per endpoint | Terminal per site | $$$ per mile trenched |
| Recurring cost | None | Per-device per month | Per-GB or committed plan | None after build |
| Endpoint battery life | Years | Months, or line power | Line power | N/A |
| Throughput | Tens of Mbps shared | High | Moderate, high latency | Very high |
| Hazardous location rating | Targeted Cl I Div 2 | Varies by modem | Rarely rated | Conduit dependent |
| Works without carrier coverage | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Supply chain / TAA | US-built | Mixed | Mixed | N/A |
Consumer-grade HaLow hardware is the fifth option and is genuinely cheaper per unit. It is also unrated for classified areas, typically sealed shut, firmware locked, and sourced offshore. If your site is not classified and your procurement has no origin requirements, it may be the right call.
07 — Open by design
OpenWrt with a documented build tree. SSH root, opkg, standard config files. Run your own MQTT broker, Modbus gateway or edge script on the unit. No license server, no activation, no cloud account required to operate the radio you bought.
Schematics, board dimensions, connector pinouts and a parts list are published. Gaskets, glands, surge modules and the antenna pigtail are orderable individually. A field tech with a hex driver can restore a unit without an RMA.
Radio, compute and I/O are separate cards. A new HaLow silicon revision or a different band plan is a module swap on the mast, not a truck roll with a new enclosure and a new mounting survey.
08 — Design partner program
Design partners get evaluation units, direct access to the engineers who wrote the firmware, and input on the I/O module roadmap. In exchange we ask for a real deployment, real RF conditions, and honest failure reports. If you need certified units in hand today, tell us your date and we will tell you plainly whether we can meet it.
What to send us
We will respond with a link budget and an honest yes or no, not a brochure.