The Swap 1.0 demonstrations were intended as a show of confidence in the HomeRF standard, which has been under siege from IEEE 802.11B advocates, who claim the IEEE standard provides higher networking bandwidth and network security, and from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), which claims Bluetooth will provide ad hoc networking capability at a fraction of the cost of other wireless networking approaches.

HomeRF's spec got a boost in August when the Federal Communications Commission voted to allow HomeRF products to take a wider swath (up to 5 MHz) of the 2.4-GHz ISM band for frequency hopping, said Ben Manny, director of residential communications products for Intel Corp. and a former chairman of the HomeRF technical working group. That decision would enable HomeRF products to embody a 10-Mbits/second bandwidth and still retain backward compatibility with the current, 2-Mbit/s Swap spec.

That 2-Mbit bandwidth suits HomeRF for the128- to 196-kbits/s data streams generated by MP3, said Manny. While in principle 802.11 offers a higher bandwidth of up to 11 Mbits/s, its partitioning of data into TCP/IP packets can be disruptive for streaming media, he said.

HomeRF uses packet data and frequency hops in a manner similar to 802.11 but provides a separate channel for cordless telephone transmissions. And a new version of the Swap specification — 2.0, due out later this year — promises greater support for streaming media.

Among the HomeRF products demonstrated at CES was an Internet alarm clock by Simple Devices Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). The wireless appliance will automatically download personal schedules, stock prices and weather information from a HomeRF-enabled PC and present it on the clock's color LCD screen in the morning. The product will likely retail in the $250 to $300 range, according to Simple Devices' content director, Gardner Grout. The gating issue for the appliance was not the availability of integrated RF transceiver modules — a problem that has plagued Bluetooth — but the availability of radio-sized color LCDs, Grout said.

Simple also demonstrated an Internet-access-point cradle for the Palm V and an MP3 audio player, expected to retail for $200, that will stream radio and audio stations from across the Internet to any room in a home.

Most of the products featured in the concept demonstrations during the Bluetooth Developers' Forum last month will not see commercial distribution for many months. While transceiver availability has been an issue for Bluetooth, a larger obstacle has been interoperability problems generated by incongruent interpretations of the Bluetooth 1.0 spec. A newly ratified cleanup specification (1.1) is expected to resolve those issues, but it may be well into 2001 before modified products begin to appear.

HomeRF, meanwhile, is shipping now, Manny asserted, noting that HomeRF Internet access adapters — along with Intel's own AnyPoint Universal Serial Bus dongles and PC card-based transceivers — are available at consumer outlets such as CompUSA and Circuit City. In fact, 95 percent of the wireless computer products now sold into the home are based on HomeRF protocols, Manny said, citing surveys from PC Data Reports.

HomeRF Internet gateways are manufactured by 2Wire, Arris Communications, Motorola, Pace Micro Technology, Proxim and Scientific-Atlanta. The Motorola SB4100W, for example, is a cable modem with a HomeRF IP distribution channel.

Another factor favoring HomeRF over Bluetooth is the former's longer transmission distance, said Ken Hasse, director of marketing for Proxim's computer networks business unit. With additional silicon, Bluetooth transmissions ultimately will cover the same 100-meter distance as HomeRF transceivers, but implementations that use the initial 10-meter Bluetooth spec will only cross a room.

Questionable network

"Bluetooth is only a cable replacement that is being promoted as a network," said Hasse. "It is really only going to go 30 feet, although people are trying to take it beyond that."

The ad hoc network envisioned for Bluetooth — the wireless connection that would let users check e-mail or cruise the Internet from a laptop computer at an airport gate or hotel lobby, for example — will likely be implemented first with HomeRF technology, said Hasse. He cited a deal among wireless-access-point provider MobileStar Network Corp. (Richardson, Texas), Microsoft and Starbucks Coffee Corp. to provide wireless Net access at Starbucks outlets. MobileStar's technology supports both direct-sequence and spread-spectrum frequency hopping. One version is compatible with 802.11 and the other is closer to HomeRF technology, but it is unclear from MobileStar's Jan. 3 announcement which technology will be used for the Starbucks implementation.

What is clear is that Proxim's HomeRF modules are making headway in seeding the market for HomeRF wireless products, much as Ericsson's Bluetooth modules are doing for that wireless standard.

The Proxim design uses silicon manufactured by National Semiconductor Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.). Proxim's Leigh Chinitz has replaced Manny as technical chair of the HomeRF working group.

"We're quoting HomeRF pricing competitive with where Bluetooth is today," said Jeff Orr, Proxim's home-networking product manager. "Besides, we're shipping."

More CES coverage.