MSFT to get into inexpensive home networks to link computers and consumer devices. These are helpful if your PC-DVD is in one room and your TV is in another. Plug it into Dave's digital video box.
Posted: 11:45 p.m. EST, 2/27/98
Microsoft to broker in-home networking standard
By Rick Boyd-Merritt
REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. will
attempt to place its imprint on yet another market
in March when it announces plans to broker a
standards effort in the emerging field of in-home
networking. The software giant has been testing
products from multiple suppliers in an effort to pick
the ones it thinks should be the technology leaders.
By summer, Microsoft hopes to hammer out
interoperability standards that would range across
systems using telephone lines, power lines, coaxial
cables and wireless links.
Microsoft says it will develop versions of Windows
CE and NT 5.0 that could power gateways linking
in-home LANs with the Internet. The Redmond,
Wash. company is expected to get backing for its
standards efforts from Compaq Computer Corp.
(Houston), Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and
Tut Systems Inc. (Pleasant Hill, Calif.), among
others.
The Microsoft initiative comes as activity in home
networking is heating up, with a number of
companies attacking the fledgling market for
products that link multiple PCs, peripherals or
consumer-electronics devices within a home. At
least one company outside the Microsoft
clique--Epigram (Sunnyvale, Calif.)--said it, too, is
interested in interoperability but does not
necessarily share Microsoft's design goals.
"Epigram is certainly not sitting still," said a source
close to the company who asked not to be named.
"They are working with some very network-centric
people who think the Microsoft proposal is
absolutely the wrong one."
Microsoft said last week that it would reveal more
of its plans at the Windows Hardware Engineering
Conference (WinHEC) in Orlando, Fla., March
25-26. "At WinHEC we will present some of the
standards we think need to be endorsed to make
home networking work," said Giorgio Vanzini, a
business-development manager in the consumer
Windows group. Those standards will initially be
general guidelines specifying Ethernet-like
architectures using a standard Internet Protocol
software stack.
"We want to start out with the most common
denominator that everyone will agree to and in the
next stage move to the more difficult issues, such as
how to handle autodetection, bridging and device
description," Vanzini said. "We are trying to come
up with a reference standard right now that could
be acceptable to all industry players."
While agreeing on the need to support
Ethernet-like architectures and IP, Epigram
diverges on questions of cost and data rates. "I
don't know if Microsoft is the right company to set
a networking standard, but I think it's important to
not rework Windows to invent a new home
network," said Tony Zuccarino, vice president of
marketing for Epigram. Still, both companies are
keen to avoid an all-out war. "We don't want to
get into a 56K [type] war like we have seen in the
modem market for the last couple years,"
Zuccarino said.
In Microsoft's view, any home-networking product
should cost less than $100 at retail if it is part of a
shipping PC, Vanzini said. "We also believe for the
next three years a data rate of 1 Mbit/second will
be adequate in the home." The company expects
no mainstream video services to be available in that
time frame, and that data rate creates "no changes
in our driver model."
Epigram, with backing from founders of
media-processor startup Chromatic Research Inc.
(Mountain View, Calif), believes that home nets
must scale to well over 10 Mbits/s. "On top of all
the requirements of Ethernet, we want to provide
quality-of-service guarantees and interoperate with
Resource Reservation Protocol [RSVP] and RTP,"
said Zuccarino. "You don't want to do something in
your underlying architecture that will preclude you
from supporting the innovations in real-time
audio/video coming in the future."
The company also departs from Microsoft in its
decision not to use off-the-shelf Ethernet
media-access controllers (MACs). "I don't think
it's important that it runs on an Ethernet MAC as
long as what Windows sees from its point of view
looks like an Ethernet MAC," said Zuccarino.
"Anything that looks like an NDIS driver should
do."
Epigram is expected to release later this year
software algorithms that run across a variety of
platforms, from 16-bit DSPs to Chromatic's Mpact
media processor. The software will handle
networking over existing telephone wiring and
process video from digital TV services expected to
go live later this year. Other media may one day be
supported, too.
For its part, Microsoft has already partnered with
Tut Systems to promote Tut's 1.3-Mbit/s
HomeRun technology, which uses an off-the-shelf
Ethernet MAC with a custom physical-layer device
(PHY) to send data across phone lines within a
home. Tut is finishing a redesign of its PHY and a
front-end analog component after Microsoft and
others requested a shift to a higher-frequency
spectrum. That will make it possible to use Tut
products in conjunction with the splitterless digital
subscriber-line "modems" being defined by the
Universal DSL Working Group (UDWG), of
which Microsoft is a member.
"We got some [UDWG] companies to say, 'if you
shift your spectrum use we will use your product,' "
said Matthew Taylor, founder, chairman and chief
technology officer of Tut, who authorized the
redesign in early January. "That's getting the
partnerships going now." (Specifically, Tut shifted
HomeRun from a range of 400 kHz to 4 MHz up
to 5.5 to 9.5 MHz. The UDWG proposal would
send a DSL signal into the home centered around
the 1.1-MHz frequency.)
Tut plans to announce in April or May partners
who will build products around its technology. It
expects to offer its initial partners working
FPGA-based adapter boards this week. Shipping
products are not expected until late May from Tut
and not from its partners until a gate array-based
design is completed later in the year. Taylor claims
the redesign set his timetable back just six weeks
and will help improve the signal-to-noise ratio of
the resulting HomeRun products.
Tut abandoned its own work on an isochronous
20-Mbit/s product using a DSP, according to
Taylor. "It worked, but no one would buy it
because it cost too much," he said. "No one has
that kind of bandwidth requirements in the home
now. The thing they want is to get Net access. So
right now what matters is being dirt cheap and
offering Net access."
Microsoft envisions home networking as a new
application opportunity for Windows and possibly
a door to new kinds of Windows-based gear in the
home. "There's a lot of talk about residential
gateways in the home," said Vanzini. "I don't know
if that's a desktop PC, a separate box or a home
server, but it could be something you plug in and
turn on and is always on."
Such gateways could allow multiple PC users in a
home to share the bandwidth of a single,
high-speed Internet connection, such as a DSL
device.
Vanzini described software bridging and routing
features that could appear in future versions of
Windows NT 5.0 (stripped of its GUI), or in
Windows CE, that could power such a home
server or gateway. "We might talk about this at
WinHEC and our partners will certainly talk about
it," he said.
Such a gateway could be a bridge between a
1-Mbit/s DSL WAN and a similar-speed home
LAN. It could also serve as an interconnect point
for multiple home-networking devices based on
diverse wireless or wired media, he added.
Microsoft intends to support some of the home
LAN interconnect functions in its systems software,
but would leave a door open to third-party
hardware and software companies to provide other
interoperability products.
"We have an agnostic strategy" concerning cable,
telephone, power and wireless media, Vanzini said.
"We'd like to endorse a specific vendor for each
physical layer, but not necessarily on an exclusive
basis."
Microsoft has tested and is providing design
feedback to at least two companies developing
power-line home networks, he added. It has also
tested multiple RF suppliers, although none
currently meet the guidelines on low cost, high
reliability and 1-Mbit/s data rates. As of now,
Microsoft is not sure if it will be able to find a
partner in the area of cable-TV home networking
in time for the WinHEC announcement, he added.
One approach Microsoft has seemingly rejected is
a course alluded to by Intel at a networking press
conference last week in which it described
low-cost hubs for in-home networking.
"Mainstream consumers will not use this
approach," said Vanzini. "It is too difficult for them
to configure a hub, and there should be no new
wires."
Indeed "no new wires" is becoming a mantra of the
Microsoft effort. However, having a PC at the
center of a home network will not be an absolute
requirement. "We are still talking about whether we
want to form a working group, propose a standard
or put something forward to the Internet
Engineering Task Force," according to Vanzini.
Multiple home PCs
Of about 42 million homes with computers in the
United States, 10 to 12 million currently have more
than one PC, according to Kevin Hause, PC
analyst at International Data Corp. (Framingham,
Mass.). That base of multiple PC users is growing
at the rate of the overall industry, or about 13
percent annually, he said.
Such homes are "still a minority of the home
market, but it's a sizable market and one that's
growing as an overall percentage of the total,"
Hause said. "But you've got to convince them they
need home networking, because its not obvious. In
a business, the need for networking is intuitive, but
at home it's much less so, because you don't really
need to send information."
Vanzini sees "sharing devices like printers and
especially high-speed Internet modems" as a "killer
app for home networking," and Zuccarino of
Epigram agrees. So, apparently, do many other
companies entering this market, including Intel. The
chip maker is said to be working on home
networking over power lines, and has spun off a
home-networking company.
"There is so much hype and too many people
popping out
of the walls, but not enough real products," said
Vanzini. "We started looking at in-home
networking about a year ago and since then
everybody has jumped on the bandwagon. Rather
than having different implementations from different
vendors it would be really nice if we could work
together."
"There's going to be a lot of positioning this year by
companies that don't have shipping products, and
we want to see how the dust settles before we
come out with our plans," said Zuccarino. |
