HomeRF

» see homerf.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

HomeRF was a wireless networking specification for the home, written by a consortium that called itself the Home Radio Frequency Working Group and that formed in 1998. The specification started out named SWAP, for Shared Wireless Access Protocol, and the name that stuck was the marketing one. It hopped frequencies inside the 2.4 GHz band and it borrowed from two places at once: the frequency-hopping half of 802.11 for data, and DECT, the cordless telephone standard, for voice. One radio, both jobs, about fifty meters of range.

The membership was not a fringe group. Proxim, Intel, Siemens, Motorola, Philips, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and Microsoft were all in it, along with more than a hundred smaller companies. For about two years this looked like the consensus answer, because the thing it was designed for was a house rather than an office, and everybody agreed that houses were about to get complicated.

The design bet was that the interesting problem in a home was not throughput. It was that a phone call and a file transfer would have to share one link without the call breaking up, which is a hard problem that 802.11b did not attempt at all in its first years. HomeRF shipped with voice priority built into the protocol. It ran at 1.6 Mbit/s at first and the 2.0 revision reached 10, which was more than the broadband line it was supposed to be sharing.

The whole premise required a household with several machines and one connection worth splitting between them. Turkey in 2001 was not that household. The normal shape was a single computer in the living room borrowing the phone line to dial out, and a cordless handset in another room that had nothing to say to it. ADSL arrived here in that window and it arrived as a way to stop tying up the phone, not as a thing to distribute. By the time a second computer in the house was ordinary, the radio in it was Wi-Fi and nobody had to choose.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the standards war ~

Proxim was the only company making HomeRF chipsets, and Proxim also sold finished HomeRF products. Every other member of the consortium was therefore buying its silicon from a direct competitor, which is a structural problem no amount of goodwill survives. The other half of the disadvantage was procedural: HomeRF was a consortium specification and 802.11 was an IEEE standard, and when a purchasing department has to justify a choice, that distinction does a lot of work.

The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance spent two years lobbying the FCC against approving wideband frequency hopping, which was the rule change HomeRF 2.0 needed to reach its 10 Mbit/s. The delay was long enough for 802.11b to build a lead that could not be caught. In 2002 that alliance renamed itself the Wi-Fi Alliance, and the new name went everywhere, because unlike HomeRF it did not have a room written into it.

~ how it actually ended ~

In March 2001 Intel announced it would stop developing HomeRF for its AnyPoint home networking line, and that was the defection that mattered, because the others had gone quietly. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and Microsoft were already out. What remained was Motorola, National Semiconductor, Proxim and Siemens, and then Proxim itself began backing away, because the bad press around HomeRF had started to damage the data networking business it actually lived on.

That left Siemens carrying the specification more or less alone, which it was apparently willing to do until it started worrying about its own cordless phone market, where mobile phones were replacing home handsets and VoIP was coming. Siemens got out of cordless phones and there was nobody left holding anything. On 8 January 2003 the trade press reported that the Home Radio Frequency Working Group had called it quits.

~ what got buried with it ~

The product worth remembering is the Motorola SimpleFi, a small box from 2002 that sat by your stereo, spoke HomeRF to a PC somewhere else in the house, and played the music off it. That is a network audio receiver several years before anyone was selling one successfully, built on the only home radio standard that had thought about streaming as a first-class problem.

Wi-Fi won the band and then spent years rebuilding, badly and in pieces, the voice quality-of-service that HomeRF had shipped with. The consortium's own archive is still online, maintained by hand by one of its former members, which is a more dignified end than most dead standards get. Everything the specification predicted about the connected house turned out to be right. It was simply going to happen on the other radio.

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