The HomeRF™ Working Group disclosed its future plans and revised messaging during an Open House held in conjunction with CONNECTIONS™ 2002: The International Home Networking and Gateways Showcase. With the enhancements, HomeRF complements other wireless standards.
The group continued to stress HomeRF’s unique ability to converge Voice, Data, and Entertainment applications but placed much more emphasis on Voice. This subtle shift directs attention to the cordless phone market, which is ten times larger than the wireless LAN market, and it should also help differentiate HomeRF from wireless data networks designed for enterprise offices.
HomeRF remains the only wireless home networking standard to support up to eight toll-quality voice connections, eight prioritized streaming media sessions, and multiple Internet and shared resource connections at broadband speeds. The HomeRF spec supports CLASS service features like call waiting, caller ID, distinctive ringing, forwarding to individual handsets, 911 breakthrough and more on an interoperable basis. It is designed to move DECT toward worldwide application with added data and streaming media support at 10 Mbps and beyond.
HomeRF leverages technology derived from the mature and popular DECT (Digitally Enhanced Cordless Telephony) cordless phone standard, which allows different brands to work together so certified handsets from one vendor can communicate with base stations from another. DECT is largely confined to Europe since its 1.9 GHz frequency band requires a license elsewhere, but HomeRF extends DECT to other regions by using the license-free 2.4 GHz band. HomeRF also adds function by blending DECT with an enhanced derivative of IEEE 802.11 Frequency Hopping for high-speed data networking and QoS support for entertainment applications.
Planned enhancements to HomeRF, also disclosed during the open house, make it even more attractive to broadband carriers, consumer households, and small businesses. Research shows that these groups view Voice services as a “must have” part of their integrated service bundles.
Work has already begun on the HomeRF 2.1 specification, which will add features designed to reinforce HomeRF voice advantages. Planned enhancements also allow HomeRF to complement other wireless standards, including versions of 802.11.
More Active Handsets – HomeRF 2.0 already supports up to 8 phone lines, 8 registered handsets, and 4 active handsets with voice quality and range comparable to leading 2.4 GHz phone systems. With that many lines, each family member can have a personal phone number. HomeRF 2.1 plans to increase the number of active handsets from 4 to 8 with the same or better voice quality, thus supporting the needs of small businesses.
More Range – The 150’ range of HomeRF covers most homes and into the yard. HomeRF 2.1 will extend that range for larger homes and businesses by using wireless repeaters that are similar to enterprise access points but without the need to connect each one to Ethernet. HomeRF frequency hopping technology also avoids the complexity of assigning RF channels to multiple access points (or repeaters) and offers easy and effective security and interference immunity. This is especially important since households and small businesses don’t have network administrators.
Voice Roaming – To allow individuals to roam across very large homes and fairly large offices while talking on the phone and without loosing their voice connection, HomeRF 2.1 will support voice roaming with soft hand-off between repeaters.
Increased Data Capacity – HomeRF 2.0 supports Ethernet speeds up to 10 Mbps with fallback speeds and backward-compatibility to earlier versions of HomeRF. Performance can be further enhanced to about 20 Mbps, and the group is evaluating the need for such enhancements at 2.4 GHz in light of its planned support of 5 GHz through bridging.
Adaptive Frequency Hopping – A proposed change to FCC Part-15 rules governing the 2.4 GHz ISM band will allow adaptive frequency hopping. While not legal today, this proposal will allow hoppers such as Bluetooth™ and HomeRF to recognize and avoid interference from static frequency technologies such as IEEE 802.11b. Since HomeRF already adjusts its hopping pattern to ensure that consecutive hops don’t land on interference, supporting this FCC proposal seems trivial.
Many analysts expect 802.11a to eventually take over as the wireless standard for enterprise offices, gain needed quality-of-service support from 802.11e, and start a slow migration into homes. It already supports 54 Mbps, and proprietary extensions increase performance to about 100 Mbps. But because of the higher frequencies used, 802.11a has disadvantages in cost, power consumption, range, and signal attenuation through materials.
Embrace and Extend IEEE 802.11a – The HomeRF Working Group believes in the peaceful coexistence of HomeRF at 2.4 GHz and 802.11a at 5 GHz since each frequency band and technology has specific strengths that complement each other. Rather than draft a specification for 5 GHz, the group simply endorses 802.11a for high bandwidth applications such as high-definition video streaming at 1080i resolution and MPEG2 compression. It plans to write application briefs describing how to bridge between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, including how to handle differences in QoS. This information, while written for 802.11a, can also apply to HiperLAN-2, 802.11h, and proprietary 802.11a extensions.