[citation needed] It was developed at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms by Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian, and Danny Cohen.
The name was chosen to emphasize that this was designed to be a slow, but very inexpensive internetworking system, and forestall "high-performance" comparison questions such as "how fast is it?"
It was intended to network buildings, improve efficiency, and gather data through the control of HVAC systems (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning).
It has been tested over radio frequency (RF), infrared (IR), ultrasonics, optical, DC and AC power wiring, and even physical representations such as printed bar codes and engraving on a key.
The design intent is to provide a simple, very inexpensive system that can transmit data slowly over many types of media, and yet still connect devices to the internet.
Connecting to the internet is a crucial part of the design, because much of the value of a networked device is provided by easy, wide access to it.
Internet 0 is similar to a serial port running at 9600 baud except it sends data by pulse-position modulation, and accepts up to 30% timing deviations.
The dual-pulse start and stop bit times permit a receiver to synchronize with the beginnings of bytes, and also measure the baud rate of a sender.
While Internet 0 works in many media, for any given transmission medium there are usually competing, preexisting physical layers that are more reliable, higher speed or lower power, such as Homeplug, or G.hn for power-line networking, or LIN for vehicles.
In the early exploration of the concept, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems and Schneider Electric were interested in commercial deployment.