The cheap answer is Seattle.

Members of the Zigbee Alliance will be in Seattle May 17-21 for their annual meeting (with a press event May 19 at the Hotel Monaco), where they hope to address limitations in the standard with a new effort. (The picture, by the way, is the cover from a 2001 market research report on Zigbee by Mareca Hatler and Michael Ritter.)

As Atmel's Zigbee page makes clear the present version of the standard, dubbed 802.15.4 by the IEEE, calls for devices that can shoot data from 1-75 meters and run for 100-1,000 days.

It sounds like a lot, but with last year's chip technology, it wasn't good enough to cause a big market splash. Philips appears to have backed away from Zigbee entirely, moving participation from its semiconductor group to its lighting group.

The answer, it seems, is a new, improved standard, 802.15.4a.

An official IEEE task force for the new standard convened in March. It's looking at such things as UWB as a higher-bandwidth alternative to 802.11 frequencies (I'd prefer they just link 'em technically in some way), along with lower power and longer range alternatives.

The problem is that, according to the group's latest timeline this new specification, whatever its merits, won't be finished and published until 2006.

I'm assuming some backwards-compatibility here, but the bottom line is that for now we've got to go with what we've got. Business and industrial markets can already profit from Zigbee applications. They will cost a lot of money, and the chips will need replacing fairly regularly. But they will also save money, and the software work that goes into them can be carried over as the power requirements go down and the market expands.

This doesn't make me less-confident about Zigbee. But sound solutions take standards, and standards take time. Wi-Fi wasn't built in a day, either.