Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Slow and Stupid Networks Often Win Race

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2003 16:35:30 -0400

Slow and Stupid Networks Often Win Race

Sun Sep  7, 3:43 PM ET

By JUSTIN POPE, AP Business Writer

BOSTON - "Faster and smarter" is the mantra in the wireless ( news 
-web sites ) world, but Robert Poor has a different vision: He dreams 
of networks that are slow and stupid.

For years, wireless has been all about developing standards like 
Bluetooth and the still-more-powerful 802.11 that can hurl data 
through the air rapidly enough to fuel complex applications like 
streaming video on laptops or cell phones.

But not everybody needs streaming video. Sometimes slow and steady - 
but light and cheap - packs more punch.

Imagine a municipal light department trying to track broken street 
lamps. It would need wireless outposts - known as nodes - in 
thousands of lamps, so the nodes must be inexpensive. Their only job 
would be to occasionally relay a simple piece of information: whether 
a light is on, or off.

"A street lamp doesn't have a lot to say," said Poor, chief 
technology officer at Ember, a Boston start-up developing low-power 
wireless networks. "They don't have to talk very fast. They don't 
have to talk very often."

Techno-visionaries have a long list of plans for low-power, low-speed 
networks, from thermostats on factory floors and in residential 
buildings to tiny battlefield sensors for the Pentagon ( news -web 
sites ) and more efficient irrigation systems.

The idea is to build motes - tiny computers that broadcast a radio 
signal - that are cheap enough to deploy everywhere but just smart 
enough to "self-organize" into powerful networks that can sense and 
convey information like whether milk is spoiled or a bookshelf 
overloaded.

Dozens of companies are working on it, but there could be an increase 
by the end of the year with the adoption of a standard called Zigbee, 
being negotiated by a consortium of companies that includes Ember and 
bigger players like Honeywell, Motorola, Philips and Samsung. The 
standard gets its name from an idea engineers are hoping to emulate: 
the zigging and zagging of bees, which are individually simple 
organisms that work together to tackle complex tasks.

Consortium members have agreed on initial portions of the standard, 
which governs how data is broadcast from a wireless node, and 
products that incorporate it are starting to trickle out. But the 
real advances won't come until the next portion is endorsed. That's 
expected some time this year.

On Zigbee, data crawls along as slow as 20 kilobits per second, about 
one-fiftieth the speed of Bluetooth. And the 802.11 family of 
wireless standards, better known as Wi-Fi, can be many times faster 
than Bluetooth.

But slow and steady has its virtues. With more complex networks, each 
"node" on the network has to be within range of a wired, expensive 
hub. With "mesh" networks like Ember, both the messages and the 
components are simple enough that each node can act as a relay 
station. In theory, the price would allow each node to be placed 
within broadcast range (about 100 feet) of another. A message could 
simply jump from lamp post to lamp post, all the way to headquarters, 
with no need for expensive hubs or wires.

Ember already can make its own nodes talk to each other, and other 
companies can do the same. The emergence of Zigbee as a standard 
would let nodes made by different companies talk to each other, 
expanding their potential exponentially.

It's the premise of "Metcalfe's Law," which states that the key to a 
powerful network isn't its sophistication, but its number of users. 
In fact, the law's namesake, Robert Metcalfe, inventor of the 
Ethernet networking standard, is one of Ember's backers.

"Sometimes you want to go far, sometimes you want to go fast. 
Sometimes you want to have low power, sometimes you have all the 
power in the world," he said. "The 747 does not obsolete the bicycle."

The Wireless Data Research Group has estimated the market for 
low-power, low-speed data networks will hit $8 billion by 2007, 
though it's likely to start in industrial areas like factory 
automation and petrochemical processing.

But Zigbee's impact remains to be seen, said Ian McPherson, an 
analyst with Wireless Data Research. Some companies may not want to 
make their products talk to others, or they may decide they can 
better solve clients' problems with their own standards.

Ericsson ( news -web sites ), for instance, has expressed interest in 
a different standard some call "Bluetooth light."

"Zigbee's not the beginning and the end of the market," McPherson said.

The consumer side may be even shakier. Many of the most obvious uses 
are in home automation, a market that has yet to take off.

"My take is the actual market for this kind of home automation 
application is not even on the horizon," said Charles Golvin, an 
analyst with Forrester. "Sure, Bill Gates ( news -web sites )' house 
can turn on the lights when people walk in and out of the room. But 
that kind of reach and demand for average users and average homes is 
way off in the distance."

Still, Kristen Law, the Zigbee point person at Motorola, said the 
company plans to integrate Zigbee into a full range of products, from 
cable boxes to cell phones and handheld computers. It's already 
producing samples of semiconductors it will sell to other 
manufacturers, and expects to begin selling its own devices within a 
year or two.

"It's very possible that by the end of 2004 you could go to Home 
Depot and buy a Zigbee light kit," she said.

For companies involved in Zigbee, the economics are tricky. Law says 
some have overhyped how inexpensive it will be off the bat, and Ember 
has found the market among the industrial customers it's targeting 
unexpectedly complicated. One company wants to monitor chemical flow 
five times a second, another wants to read a gas meter once a day for 
10 years.

Ember decided to stop selling complete systems and now sells chips 
and software licenses, then helps customers build the technology into 
their own systems.

But Poor, a musician who went back to school at age 42 to pursue a 
Ph.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( news -web sites 
)'s Media Lab, still envisions a future in which tiny wireless 
networks go about their business unnoticed, cheap and puny in their 
individual components but powerful when working together.

"I can't tell you any more than I could in 1985 what the intelligence 
will be," he said. "In a sense, I hope there won't be a killer app. 
There will just be lots of things quietly doing their thing."

On the Net:

Zigbee Alliance: http://www.zigbee.org

Ember: http://www.ember.com

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030907/ap_on_hi_te/slow_dumb_networks

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