I have referred back to this post about the smart home utopia many times since I wrote it 14 years ago.
Over the years, there have been many false dawns as candidates for the “X” protocol have come and gone. But maybe 2022 will finally see the launch of the smart home.
Progress is important
Back in 2014, Nest announced Thread, their new wireless mesh network protocol for the smart home. This was a big step towards “X” because it was important that it was based on IP. Additionally, it provided low network consumption, works over 6LoWPAN, similar to zigbee, and is better suited to some devices than power-hungry Wi-Fi.
2017 saw further development with the release of Dotdot, described as “the Zigbee Alliance’s universal language for IoT”
Fast forward two years and 2019 saw the surprise announcement that some major rivals, including Apple, Google and Amazon, were coming together to work on the Connected Home over IP project. At the time I wrote –
Is. This. Finally. The. One? Who knows, there have been so many false starts before with a few that looked promising. But there are some huge names and more importantly powerful rivals coming together to work on the problem. The fact that the home automation industry is admitting it has a problem and that these big players are coming together has to be a good sign.
The Zigbee Alliance changed its name to the Connectivity Standards Alliance, and in May of last year that clumsy moniker “Connected Home over IP Project” was replaced, rebranded as “Mater”.
A press release at the time promised that Matter would be “breaking down these barriers to IoT growth and adoption – interoperability, walled gardens and complexity”, bringing “new user experiences” with “more connections between more objects” and ultimately providing “more ways to make smart homes and buildings hum”.
Matter allows smart home devices to communicate with each other locally, directly over Wi-Fi or Thread. This addresses many of the drawbacks of Cloud-only systems with their concerns about resiliency, security, and privacy. While it may remove the need for a large number of those hubs and network bridges, you may need a few.
Matter works on Wi-Fi and that Thread layer we also mentioned. The system uses Bluetooth LE for setup, like many other systems today and uses an open source approach.
Is everything rosy then? Well, there is still the potential for some products not to support all aspects of the others in the system and the group needs to work hard to avoid falling back into the same old mess that got us here.
What will 2022 bring?
We should see the first Matter devices appear at the end of this year, although that could put some customers off buying smart homes for much of 2022, waiting for the Matter Logo to appear on the box? It would be good to get clarity from the manufacturer on which existing SKUs will support the standard. In terms of development, this newly announced chip with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 and 802.15.4 should help OEMs develop new Matter products.
With the ability to connect the Apple Home app to Siri, Amazon’s Echo and other Alexa devices plus Google Assistant, the Matter should get very big, very soon. With those major players in the self-installing smart home space, Matter looks tantalizingly close to becoming that interoperable smart home standard, the missing link that has held the industry back for nearly 2 decades.
It’s shaping up to be the invisible glue that binds the DIY smart home together, and that could be enough to set the entire industry on the path to great success. Time will tell.
Listen to this Vergecast podcast on Matter…