LoRaWAN vs mioty vs Wi-Fi HaLow: which long-range IoT radio works best indoors?

The short answer: range, energy and data rate pull in different directions

When people compare LoRaWAN vs mioty vs Wi-Fi HaLow indoors, the honest answer is that none of the three wins everything. A 2026 study from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences tested all three side by side in the same university building, on the same EU sub-GHz band at the same 14 dBm transmit power, which is rare: most comparisons stitch together results from unrelated studies or simulations.

In that test, mioty delivered every packet from every node position, LoRaWAN reached the far end of the floor but started losing packets at the most distant nodes in some settings, and Wi-Fi HaLow lost contact entirely beyond the third of seven positions. HaLow, however, had the lowest energy per packet once a device was already associated with its access point. The authors conclude the three reflect different design philosophies rather than one being universally better.

How each radio gets its range

LoRa uses chirp spread spectrum, and its spreading factor sets the trade-off. A higher spreading factor stretches each symbol over more time, which buys processing gain: the study measured a 15.05 dB difference between SF12 and SF7. More gain means the receiver can pull weaker signals out of the noise, at the cost of longer airtime and more energy.

mioty, standardised by ETSI as TS 103 357, takes a different route called telegram splitting. Each message is encoded with forward error correction, chopped into many short sub-packets, and sent across a pattern of times and narrow frequencies. Because the receiver can rebuild the message even after losing a large share of those sub-packets, a burst of interference or a collision rarely destroys the whole thing.

Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah) is ordinary IP-based Wi-Fi moved down into the sub-1 GHz bands. Lower frequencies penetrate walls and floors better than 2.4 or 5 GHz Wi-Fi, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance describes HaLow chipsets delivering tens of Mbps, far more than LoRa-class links. It also inherits Wi-Fi power-saving tools such as Target Wake Time, which let devices sleep between scheduled exchanges.

What the side-by-side indoor test actually found

Receiver sensitivity explains most of the range result. In a cabled attenuation test, LoRaWAN at SF12 and mioty both decoded packets down to about -138 dBm, LoRaWAN at SF7 to about -124 dBm, and Wi-Fi HaLow to about -110 dBm. Those few tens of dB are the difference between reaching the far rooms of a building and stopping a few rooms away.

Energy told a different story. Sending a 51-byte payload from a cold start cost about 16.5 mWs for LoRaWAN SF7, 235.5 mWs for SF12, 201.6 mWs for mioty, and roughly 171 to 174 mWs for HaLow, whose cold start includes joining the network. Once HaLow was already associated, a packet cost only about 13.2 to 13.5 mWs. The authors turned this into idealised battery-life estimates for two AA cells sending once an hour, ranging from 11.6 years for LoRaWAN SF12 to 81 years for an associated HaLow device; real devices will do worse because sleep current, sensors and self-discharge are not included.

Choosing a radio for an indoor sensor project

If the sensors are scattered deep inside a large building and each sends a small reading occasionally, the study favours LoRaWAN at a high spreading factor or mioty, with mioty showing the most robust delivery. If the sensors are closer to an access point, need to move more data, or benefit from plain IP networking and existing Wi-Fi tooling, HaLow becomes attractive, especially if devices can stay associated rather than rejoining for every message.

The results come with limits the authors spell out: one building, one floor, specific evaluation hardware, and no regional duty-cycle limits applied during the range tests. Latency, throughput and behaviour under heavy load were not measured. Treat the numbers as a well-controlled data point, then test in your own building before committing to a network.