ZigBee - hot new wireless tech

Throw away your remote at home, a new wireless technology is riding into town.

So you will be able to control all the devices in your house "� your airconditioners, television set, microwave oven, refrigerator and the lighting system "� by pushing a few buttons on your personal digital assistant (PDA), wireless phone or laptop.

That's for starters. You'll also be able to control entry through your door (so keeping out undesirable visitors), command your microwave to start grilling the chicken or for the airconditioner to be switched on so you can enter a cool house, by sending a message from your mobile phone when you're a kilometre from home.

What is more, your gadgets at home will be able to communicate to each other. So if your microwave has a faulty thermostat, fret not "� your lighting system at home will send a message to a meter on a collection point (say, a lamp post) that the thermostat needs to be fixed.

That, in turn, will forward the message to the electricity company's data centre. The data centre will then route the message to the oven manufacturer, which in turn can fix a time for its representative to come and rectify the fault.

If that sounds like you'll be entering a brave new futuristic world, you're on target. That world is upon us. The technology involved is called ZigBee and promises to fundamentally change our lifestyles forever.

At the heart of the new technology are tiny sensors that can be embedded in an array of appliances used daily at home or in factories, farms and offices.

These sensors have the ability to pick up information on temperature, chemicals and water or on whatever you programme them for. And they require very little power. So their batteries can last for over 10 years and require hardly any maintenance.

Data can be passed wirelessly from one sensor to another. You can pick this data on your computer or PDA and control functions remotely. So an automated home, office and factory will become a reality.

ZigBee works on the 2.4 Ghz spectrum used by microwave ovens. The spectrum is available without your having to pay a licence fee in most countries, including India.

ZigBee is backed by global majors like Samsung, Motorola, Philips, Honeywell, Mitsubishi Electric and ABB, all part of the ZigBee Alliance which was set to develop open standards for the technology. Alliance members are pouring millions of dollars into research so that they can launch exciting new products.

The first products and networks for homes are expected to roll out at the end of this year (ZigBee-enabled thermostats and lighting systems are already available in the market but they are not networked with one another), once the open standard specifications are put in place.

Estimates of the size of the global market for ZigBee products vary "� anywhere from 100 million to a couple of billion ZigBee-based products are expected to be shipped across the globe by 2007.

What relevance does ZigBee have for India? Most Indian companies, including multinationals that are associated with ZigBee, have only a cursory idea of the technology or no idea at all.

But international ZigBee backers think that India could be both a hotbed of technology and software development for the technology and also a large market for ZigBee-enabled products.

That is already happening. In Bangalore, the country's IT capital , over 20 software specialists at Airbee Wireless have been working quietly for the last few months on an innovative project for their US parent.

They aren't quite run-of-the- mill software engineers, either. Most have doctorates in engineering and years of experience in developing embedded wireless software.

Says Airbee Wireless president and CEO Raj Sundaresan: "Our mission is to make India our centre for technical and research excellence because it has proven skills in embedded software".

To be sure, India has other advantages "� costs are lower than in the US, and the time difference can be leveraged to speed up product delivery to the market. Airbee Wireless is planning to expand its operations in India by increasing its R&D staff strength to 60 in the next one year.

Sundaresan believes that India's software giants will soon clamber aboard the ZigBee bandwagon. They already have Bluetooth software expertise and would obviously look at extending their client base.

Others see India as a large market for low cost solutions. Says Venkat Bahl, vice president of Ember Corporation (see interview): "India would probably be one of the biggest markets."

Bahl cites just one example: a ZigBee-enabled automated meter reading solution will rule out the need for electricity distribution companies manually reading electricity meters at homes ( meters with sensors will communicate the data to a remote console connected to the data centre "� so millions of metres can be read without having to visit homes).

He says the market for this one product could run to a few million in a very short time. He adds: "If you add to this the building automation and energy savings that are now being mandated by the government, we are talking of selling more than 100 million units very soon."

Ember is already working with an Indian company it declines to name and has had discussions with many others on ZigBee applications that range from automated meter reading to industrial and process control. That's not all. ZigBee sensors could be used for monitoring pipelines (and issue warnings if leakages occur, for example).

Hotels could use ZigBee sensors to control airconditioning and lights, thereby reducing power bills. Airbee reckons that companies could save as much as 97 per cent by replacing cabling (needed in a plant to monitor the health of equipment) with ZigBee sensors.

The pea sized ZigBee sensors are available at $3 a piece in the US but both size and price will come down in the next three years as volumes pick up. Starter kits at home (the remote, the networking system and the sensors) could cost $300-$900, depending on how many appliances you want to network.

For all the hoo-hah about ZigBee, the technology has its share of sceptics. Says a senior executive at Tata Power, which uses swipe cards to read meters so that that pilferage is minimised : "Any remote meter reading system will not work in India, because people will break into the frequencies and alter the readings. This is a different market."

But Airbee is optimistic that by mid next year some ZigBee products will hit the country. It thinks that with perennial power shortages, energy management and management of assets (factories where power is a major cost), ZigBee will gain widespread acceptance here.

Still, as in the case of any other technology, ZigBee's success will depend on whether it can deliver what it promises at an affordable cost.

But how's it different?

How does ZigBee differ from infra red (used to remotely connect your TV) or Bluetooth (used in mobile phones) or Wi-Fi (which allows you to be on the net all over your house)?

Infra red technology needs "line of sight" to function and offers only single direction point-to-point connectivity. It operates within a distance of 10 metres, unlike ZigBee (up to 1.6 kilometres).

Secondly, most infra red devices (like your TV remote) are based on proprietary technology (that is why one TV remote can't be used with another TV brand), unlike ZigBee which is based on open standards. So the cost of the product is cheaper. Wi-Fi- again operates within short distances and is quite expensive.

ZigBee is much less expensive than Bluetooth. The cost of a Bluetooth system sometimes is more than the cost of the product in which it is to be embedded. According to Airbee, a ZigBee operating system is a quarter of the cost of a Bluetooth operating system.

Also, a Bluetooth system can support at the most seven devices, versus ZigBee's 64,000 devices that can communicate to one another. Last but not least, ZigBee sensors require only a tenth of the power required by Bluetooth devices.