New low-power home network standard enters crowded field

I received an announcement from Semtech last week of their support for the ONE-NET open standard for low-power wireless devices. Huh? I hear a lot about Zigbee, as well as other wireless sensor networks based on the IEEE 802.11.4 standard, such as the Dust Networks’ TSMP protocol, but ONE-NET was a new one to me. The announcement said that TI, Micrel, Renesas, and some other companies were also ONE-NET members, but the information page didn’t tell me much about the standard itself. So I talked with Steve Jillings, the network guru at Semtech, and he filled me in.

ONE-Step is the outgrowth of work done by Threshold Corp aimed at home networking and control. Threshold saw an opportunity for making a very, very simple network that relied on a narrow fixed sub-one GHz band, and avoided the complexity of 802.11.4’s spread-spectrum band. Threshold decided to make it open in the hopes of getting other companies to support it. They may have something there – ONE-NET goes after simple-and-easy-to-use, while Dust goes after absolutely reliable connections, kinda like the Fed-Ex motto – when it absolutely has to get there. Semtech is protocol agnostic – they make sub-one transceivers, and they don’t really care what protocol you choose to implement the network. Which is probably a pretty safe bet until all of the standards is low-power wireless shake themselves out.