Microsoft Broadband Networking

~ the obit ~

In July 2002 Microsoft made a public diagnosis: home networking was too hard to use. This was correct. Getting two computers and a cable modem to share a connection in 2002 involved a driver CD, a subnet mask, and usually a phone call to somebody's cousin. Microsoft's response was to announce that it would build the boxes itself, and by September 2002 there was a Microsoft-branded wireless base station on American shelves.

The catalog ran on MN- part numbers. The MN-500 was the anchor: an 802.11b base station that was also a router and also a four-port Ethernet switch, which was three products in one enclosure at a time when buying them separately was normal. Around it sat the MN-510 USB adapter and the MN-520 PC Card for laptops, plus plain Ethernet switches and network cards for people who had not been persuaded about radio yet. The MN-700 followed in September 2003 with 802.11g.

The part Microsoft actually got right was the software. There was a setup wizard that walked a non-technical person through the whole thing, a Broadband Network Utility that sat on the desktop and showed what was connected, and automatic firmware updating at a point when most router vendors expected you to download a .bin file and pray. The MN-500 was also among the first consumer base stations to turn WEP on by default, which sounds trivial and was not; the industry standard at the time was to ship wide open and let the customer discover encryption later, or never.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ twenty months ~

It worked immediately. By January 2003, four months after launch, Microsoft Broadband Networking was the second best selling Wi-Fi brand in US retail. That is a remarkable result for a software company's first attempt at radio hardware, and it validated the whole thesis: people were not buying the best router, they were buying the one they believed they could set up.

Then 802.11g arrived and Microsoft was late to it. The MN-700 did not ship until September 2003, by which point Linksys and NetGear and D-Link had been selling g products for months and the retail shelf had moved. Cisco had bought Linksys in March 2003, which turned the category's leader into a division of the largest networking company on earth. Competing there meant committing to a hardware refresh cycle Microsoft had no strategic reason to run, and in May 2004 it stopped. The whole business lasted about twenty months from first shipment to exit.

~ what stayed in the box ~

The interesting afterlife is that Microsoft was right about the diagnosis and wrong about the cure. Home networking really was too hard, and it got fixed, but it got fixed by the ISPs rather than by retail. Within a few years the router stopped being something you chose and became something that arrived in a box with your broadband contract, preconfigured, with the Wi-Fi password printed on a sticker underneath. That is what happened in Turkey too: the TTNet ADSL modem showed up with the line, and almost nobody bought a router at a shop.

The MN units still turn up on auction sites, grey boxes with the old Microsoft logotype on them, usually sold by people who found one in a drawer and had to look up what it was. Twenty months of hardware is a thin trace to leave, but the setup wizard idea outlived the product by decades.

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