The Weightless standards group  promoting a royalty-free open standards initiative to promote a wireless Internet of Things, today announced a new Special Interest Group (SIG).

It's goal is to accelerate the adoption of “Weightless” as a wireless wide area global standard for machine to machine (M2M) short to mid-range communications taking advantage of unused television broadcast radio spectrum.

ARM, Cable & Wireless Worldwide, CSR and Neul have today formally signed the “SIG Promoter Agreement,” which details how they will back the Weightless effort to establish a new standard and encourage its adoption worldwide.

The Weightless standard this group will define is on track for completion in early 2013 is targeted at a broad niche between building- and campus-capable wireless M2M alternatives such as Zigbee and broader Internet-wide IoT efforts based on standards such as the 6LoWPAN.

Weightless argues that a standard designed specifically for short to mid-range machine communications within white space is needed. The television spectrum derived technology it is promoting and developing has been optimized for this specific scenario and is delivered as a royalty-free open standard.

With such a royalty-free set of standards for delivery of M2M and IoT services, Weightless members believe hardware costs will also be lower, including a chipset cost under $2, a range of up to 10km and a battery life of 10 years.

Weightless is currently signing up members on its website.