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ZigBee's unfinished symphony

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Aug 2002 08:35 BST

How do you launch a new networking standard? Once, they just arrived on the desks of engineers. Now networking is part of everyone's lives and even Dixons' sales staff have heard of 802.11, that's no longer good enough. The ground has to be prepared, the marketing message tuned and the product ready to go when people know they want it. It has to have a name, not just a number -- Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. And now, say hello to ZigBee.

Also known as 802.15.4 to its friends, ZigBee comes from people like Philips, Motorola and Mattel -- yes, Barbie and HotWheels Mattel -- which should give you a clue that it's not something that Cisco's going to build into its carrier-grade backbone routers anytime soon. ZigBee is a 20 to 200kbps, 800MHz, 900MHz and 2.4GHz wireless networking protocol that's aimed at home control, low-speed computer peripherals, toys, PDAs and other battery-operated devices.

To that end, it's designed to be simple, cheap and very low power, with a ZigBee device running from six months to two years on a pair of AA batteries. The high speeds only work over 10 metres or so -- up to 75m if you use the lower speeds -- but nodes can form a mesh, repeating signals between themselves to give you a much longer range.

ZigBee looks like a good idea, for all the same reasons that Bluetooth initially looked like a good idea. "It's not a network," said the Bluetooth bods at launch, "it's a cable replacement." But nobody was quite serious enough about the non-network bits, and the standard was too complex to be cheap and reliable quickly enough. Things are being sorted out now, yet we're a long way from the five-dollar Bluetooth chip in every mobile phone. ZigBee may escape that fate, not least because the ZigBee hive mind has been watching Bluetooth and taking notes. They seem to be asking the right questions. Unfortunately, they seem a little uncertain about answering them.