Quentin Hardy

Quentin Hardy, Forbes Staff

I cover enterprise tech & its impact on business

6/09/2004 @ 12:55PM

The Wireless Boom That Won't Need Us

As big as the hard-wired Internet is, wireless makes it bigger. Consider: Many, if not most, of the 500 million cell phones expected to sell this year have some sort of Internet link. Then throw in all the public hot spots, home Wi-Fi connections, wireless workplaces and web-enabled PDAs.

Nice start, but it pales next to the prospect of ZigBee, an emerging wireless standard for short-range machine to machine communications. ZigBee is not for big corporate servers monitoring each others’ transactions, but, rather, it’s designed to link up an unimaginable number of tiny devices. Think thermostats, lighting controls, environmental sensors, and medical monitors. Networks comprised of these automated devices will generate more information than people can hope to consume and potentially establish hitherto unknown patterns that tell how the world works. Call it the Robonet.

Some experts predict that, by 2010, there will be 10,000 machines for every person connected to the Internet. “They could be off by a factor of ten in either direction [i.e., either 1000 or 100,000 machines per person on the Net], and it would still be a huge development,” says Salil Pradhan, the chief technologist for sensing networks at Hewlett Packard’s advanced research labs. “We’re going to an Internet of things and devices–it started with person to person, went to machine/machine, next will be micro machines.”

ZigBee is a protocol that works on the 802.15.4 spectrum (WiFi is also known as 802.11 for its slice of spectrum.) As a short-range, low-power protocol, ZigBee is suited for two-way communications among small devices, and can be used to build self-organizing networks of devices. There have been previous efforts to build sensor nets by various private companies, but, like the Internet and Wi-Fi, Zigbee uses open standards, lowering the costs and risks associated with building the technology.

Besides HP, other members of the ZigBee Alliance, the trade group promoting the standard, include Honeywell , Philips , and Texas Instruments , plus numerous startups. Two chip companies, Chipcon AS of Norway, and Freescale, the semiconductor unit of Motorola that is expected to be spun out in the third quarter of this year, already produce ZigBee-compliant silicon. Chipcon recently announced chips as cheap as $2 apiece.

Pradhan sees a play for HP in making end-to-end ZigBee solutions like heat-sensitive sensor nets in corporate data centers, designed to prevent critical machines from over heating. ZigBee startups figure there’s still a good business working on the basic building blocks of the technology.

“There’s still a lot to develop, test, and make interoperable between multiple hardware platforms,” says Joe Markee, president of Figure 8 Wireless, a ZigBee software startup. “This is complex networking–how to give devices addresses, exchange information, form networks, store and forward.” Still, he expects ZigBee’s first commercial products will ship by the end of this year.

Other big tech players are planning for the Robonet even without ZigBee. Microsoft , which is developing its .Net standard in part to increase automated communications on the Internet, is not a member of the ZigBee Alliance.

Late last year, Microsoft released a small, low-power operating system called Spot, which is potentially useful in sensor networks. Much as the open-source Linux operating system stands in contrast to Microsoft’s proprietary Windows NT, Spot is a Microsoft alternative to “Tiny O/S,” an open-source operating system common in sensor networks.

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