Siemens Demos Home RF Phone

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Siemens and chipmaker Proxim completed a lab demonstration of a cordless-phone voice call using the Home RF wireless-network standard.

HomeRF cordless phones, which the company hopes to deliver in early 2002, would deliver unified voice and data messaging over broadband services such as DSL and cable modems. The phones could also share wireless bandwidth with HomeRF computer and A/V networks in a home.

"The next step for us is to demonstrate HomeRF voice on top of cable and DSL platforms this summer," said Ken Haasa, HomeRF Working Group chairman.

The lab demo used the new 2.0 specification, which expands the data rate to 10MBps from a current delivering an effective throughput, or payload, of 4-6MBps. The group stresses that HomeRF is the only home-network standard (wired or wireless) to support toll-quality cordless-phone service. That's because the standard automatically dedicates 100Kbps of bandwidth to a Home RF cordless phone as soon as the phone is in use. HomeRF incorporate Europe's DECT (Digitally Enhanced Cordless Telephony) standard for cordless phone use.

Other wireless standards implement Quality of Service (QoS) measures to prioritize multimedia streams and voice-over-IP over other datastreams to prevent dropouts, Haase said, but even then, voice calls are "prioritized with other devices, so they're still contending for bandwidth" with one another.