On Jan. 7, just about the time I was talking to Conexant chief executive Dwight Decker about how ruthless and unprofitable the consumer PC market was, Cisco Systems Inc. was making its premiere appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, launching a consumer line of business under Robba Benjamin, part of a New World network effort involving more than 30 partners.

Now, it's easy to see why a company Cisco's size would like to have a consumer-branding campaign as successful as "Intel Inside." But Cisco had better look again at the woes of specialty real-time OS vendors like Wink and Microware, or examine the uphill battle Echelon has faced getting Lonworks accepted in the home, before it assumes the Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) will be a household name any time soon.

The strategy here is unclear. If voice over Internet Protocol is the primary aim, there are simpler ways of implementing it than a Cisco IP stack. If embedded IOS routing for a set-top box or residential gateway is the goal, Cisco had better understand how the home will bend the phrase "least-cost routing." A representative of the Consumer's Union told National Public Radio a couple of weeks ago that the "dirty little secret" of the home market is that all consumers, even bandwidth hogs, will use the simplest and cheapest access methods available, which means if a home net exists at all, it will have a Layer 2 bridge at its center.

This message bears repeating for all the hardware proponents of Home PNA, Home RF, Bluetooth and the other home-networking schemes vying for market acceptance. At the joint IEEE/ETSI meeting on radio nets earlier this month in Orlando, Fla., members were united in their aggravation with ad hoc coalitions for home networking. The coalitions say they're not working with standards bodies because a home net needs to be developed very quickly. Why? So components can be commoditized before their time?

Home markets always take a long time to develop and demand instant bargain pricing. Network component vendors price-bomb their wares to create a market, leading to instant dissolution of margins before volumes become high. Is Cisco sure it wants to play here? Is anyone?

Last week, on the eve of ComNet, Lucent Technologies held a function in New York to tout yet another home-network initiative. I'm glad I'll be among carriers and the OEMs who serve them at the ComNet show this week, so I don't have to think about the unforgiving and unpleasant market for home networking.