All these new standards looking to become the successor to WiFi/Zigbee IoT devices, yet every single one makes the same mistake - they think that because they find ways to force certification, take away end user control and extract licensing fees, that they’re somehow going to convince people to buy it as the next big thing.
I was cautiously optimistic when Matter/Thread was in its early days, but predictably as with most of these industry backed standards it’s turned into another pay to play walled garden. The CSA seems to be particularly bad at this.
Cant wait to see in subsequent years all the additional e-waste when manufacturers consider devices obsolete, and no one can repurpose them because of Matter spec mandating secure boot.
FWIW, the "Suzi" thing they're talking about seems like an attempt to compete with LoRa, which while technically an open standard is entirely dominated by Semtech.
It's not clear to me why the manufacturers aren't just making LoRa radios. This feels like an xkcd 927 situation to me.
It's very confusing with a new Zigbee standard when I thought it was being replaced with Thread
And from the same organization that co-designed and promotes Matter.
Personally, I'm very happy that Zigbee continues to be developed. I am not very enthusiastic about everything being IP addressable (even if it is just ULA) and the convoluted Thread flow where a bunch of border routers require you to initiate the pairing with a phone over BLE to hand it over to the router. I have an Eve Energy Thread + Matter plug and it requires many takes to pair it correctly. Most Zigbee devices are just a matter of permitting join on your coordinator and holding/pressing the pairing button on the device.
I wish that Apple and Google would just add a Zigbee coordinator (or just leave home automation to others) and put some effort into supporting a wide variety of devices rather than trying to disrupt a perfectly working standard. They often cannot even bother implementing the latest Matter spec timely.
As someone who's run (and continues to run) both ZWave and Zigbee networks for over 10 years I find the direction of Zigbee rather frustrating. They used to be the antithesis of Zwave with it's frustrating "licensing" and now seems to be as though they're towing that line. Most likely because they got in bed with Google, Apple and the garbage that is Matter.
I don't understand people criticizing this. Didn't they read the article? The new Suzi stuff doesn't want to replace Zigbee, and the new zigbee version is backwards compatible.
I would assume, yet _another_ standard. There are a bunch of them, and product builders are taking a long long time to properly implement, and often buggy. And they often result in the consumer need to buy yet another gateway/router, and learn the ins/outs and quirks of another protocol that won't work properly in years, all the while two new competing standards have been introduced. An example - how long has Matter existed? Yet, it hasn't had a profile for smart plugs with energy monitoring (eg the 12$ IKEA one). Such a basic use case...
And all this so Samsung et al can siphon off more user data and show more ads.
I hope Zigbee stays. It’s widely used and works really well. Matter may be even better but it also makes it really hard for manufacturers to actually make products that can be sold cheaply. Zigbee is just good enough and I believe the push to replace it has ulterior motives.
Yeah, same. Zigbee hits the sweet spot of offline and just interoperable enough. Matter has added so many features that I might as well just use WiFi devices, and it doesn't sound like the consortium has the customer's best interests in mind.
Zigbee is indeed good enough. The issue is that it solves the problem well enough and doesn't allow for maximizing how much customers are milked for. So customers will always choose Zigbee over any other option that also solves the problem plus some useless features, less control, and increased security surface area.
There is a very clear signal that is easy to pick up: either you support zigbee in your IoT device or you are trying to undermine the customer. No customer wants to be undermined. This should make Zigbee support a very easy choice for companies operating in a competitive space. Simply succeeding in the market should be enough and if it isn't that is the company's existential challenge.
Yeah, I can just not wrap my brain around the Thread and Matter push. Zigbee works great, devices are affordable, there are many devices out there already. Also people who already have Zigbee will have to build an additional Thread mesh. This all seems so pointless unless there is another motive.
The good thing is that at least for a somewhat technical crowd, there is absolutely no need to buy into any of this, as there have been proper solutions available since at least 2018.
Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.
Sticking to pure zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt and slae.sh's excellent USB coordinator.
A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of spare IKEA zigbee devices before they go out of stock. Around 2030 I'll take a look if thread/matter is anywhere near mature and has settled.
Personally, I find their contact sensors (the tall-ish thin ones) to be quite unreliable. I live in a modest home with plenty of zigbee devices as repeaters nearby and the contact sensors often stop reporting at random. I’ll pop it off the door, click repair on my coordinator and then hit the reset switch on the sensor; back online.
I like them because they can use rechargeable AAA batteries but if I still have to touch them every few weeks to repair, I’d rather switch to a different brand that is more reliable and uses less ideal battery formats.
That said, the newish Inspelling plugs in the EU market are fantastic. They report reliably, can handle larger loads, and cost about €10. For that price, it’s hard to complain that they are a bit larger than other options.
Side question but where would one learn how to do this that way? Any guides, reddit? The home automation market seems such a mess every time I check it out.
And that's pretty much it, you can add devices through the MQTT add-on page. They will also become available as entities in the rest of Home Assistant, and you can make graphs, dashboards, actions, etc.
You can also run + install zigbee2mqtt and Mosquitto on a Linux machine, but HAOS give you more of an integrated solution with dashboards, graphs, backups, cloud access, etc.
> Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.
The only worry is if manufacturers stop developing Zigbee products. Ikea for example made cheap and good Zigbee devices but they've said they're moving away from Zigbee.
You mean "Thread"? Or "Matter over Thread", which some vendors also just call "Matter" (which technically can also stand on it's own, but in many cases implies a Thread requirement). I'm wondering if that muddiness in bad communication will be a significant factor in hindering consumer adoption.
That’s my issue with it: iot devices shouldn’t have access to the internet by default. With Matter it’s possible. No one is going to create outbound firewall rules for these things.
I think it's only a matter of time before it's the same for Thread + Matter. Currently they get an ULA IPv6 address on (most?) border routers and you can ping the devices on the local network. It will be too attractive extend the standard to permit phoning home for 'analytics to improve the product' (I don't think this is possible yet with the current standard? But hard to tell.).
Any particular advantage to Suzi over Thread? Why didn't they adopt an IP based standard that is interoperable with ... all major networks since ~1995 (if not before)?
Multiple reasons like not enough v4 IPs, devices being able to sleep most of the time to conserve power, security cameras and IoT devices getting hacked and faling prey to by botnet operators etc.
No one is giving their IoT devices public IPv4 addresses. They would be behind a NAT. RFC 1918 provides 17,891,322 usable IP addresses for each private network. If we want to be a little more adventurous, RFC 6598 provides an additional 4,194,302 usable addresses and 240.0.0.0/4 is another 268,435,454 usable addresses "reserved for future use" since 1989, but still sitting unused so we can use them as internal addresses inside a NAT anyway (for example, AWS uses this range internally).
Show me a network that is using all 290,521,078 addresses and I'll show you a network managed by a team of network engineers who can just set up IPv6.
You still have to manage those and assign them through DHCP every time the device wakes up and turns the radio on. Maybe WiFi 7 will address that with the low power mode? Also, I don't want a 100 sensor mesh network on my LAN. That's why Thread uses a IPv6 6LoWPAN. One should use that if they want to bridge to IP.
> Matter 1.5 introduces one of the most anticipated additions to the specification: cameras. Developers can now build and certify cameras that interoperate directly with Matter-enabled ecosystems, without the need for custom APIs or integrations.
> Matter cameras support live video and audio streaming using established WebRTC technology, enabling two-way communication and both local and remote access via standard STUN and TURN protocols. The specification also defines support for multi-stream configurations, pan-tilt-zoom controls, detection and privacy zones, and flexible storage options, including continuous or event-based recording to local or cloud destinations.
You might as well put a pause on any new IP camera purchase for now until these hit the market.
I have to say that the Matter Cast standard sounded good, but ended up being an abomination, imo. Instead of ther being a boradly available platform for casting, my crude understanding is that to have Matter Cast work, there has to be some out of band way for an app that wants to cast to have a reciprocal app available on the target device. There's nothing provided to help facilitate this.
Where-as with DIAL and for the first decade of Google Cast, the device being cast to was basically a web browser & could run any url. It made it so any device could be cast to from any app. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_Launch
It's been incredibly disappointing seeing Matter build a standard that completely fails to offer a usable path. I really want to be wrong here, but it sure seems like Matter Cast requires every device to have its own unique bespoke partnership & install already loaded, for everything that will be able to cast to it. It standardizes some protocols for how to communicate, but there's such an anti-standard vendor-controlled limited anti-ecosystem basis.
I really really want Matter to be a good better world. I hope Matter Cameras can bring some unity to streaming camera systems. But man I can not see how Matter Cast could be worse designed, more hostile to the freedom to cast that we've enjoyed, and I really worry for this ecosystem as a whole if this is what Matter is willing to ship.
I'd also really like to see affirmations that Matter is usable sans any big network, sans Google Apple and whomever else. That it really is something we can run ourselves. But I haven't seen validation that Matter really is as liberatory as it's promises, haven't seen evidence that folks really can undo the Internet of Shit damage with Matter. I hope it's just all us being extremely slow on the uptake, but I have heard just so little about running our own provisioning/control networks on Matter. I want so much to believe but my vibe is that we've been rug pulled again.
> I'd also really like to see affirmations that Matter is usable sans any big network, sans Google Apple and whomever else. That it really is something we can run ourselves.
I'm using Matter (over Thread, mostly) with Home Assistant – in addition to using it with Apple HomeKit, but I could have done it exclusively HA. My devices get an IPv6 ULA from the border router, HA can directly talk to them without any internet or cloud involved. Does this qualify?
It's true that certain non-standardized features are only available through "extensions" ie. the device vendor app. But both Thread and Matter get new revisions, and the devices get firmware updates in a standard way (again, installable via Home Assistant) to take advantage of new features and stability updates. All of this has gotten better with time.
But the best thing about Matter is that I'm not locked into a specific ecosystem or dependent on an app from the device vendor. So, in my view it has been a slow start but with steady improvement. And the right direction IMHO.
What I really don't like about thread/matter is that it is becoming the de-facto standard that thread border routers are connected to the internet.
This will in time result in IoT devices that actually mandate this connection (it was already stipulated in a recent version of the protocol). The end result will be that a new protocol was created, but rather than devices being able to run on their own, we end up with beds in heating mode, ie. the garbage we were trying to avoid in the first place.
A lot of zigbee infrastructure also expect an internet connection.
These border routers also double as admins, and people want their smart home stuff to be available while they are outside their home network.
Thread devices can mandate internet connectivity the same way Wifi devices can.
Matter defines profiles and does certification that says your light bulbs cannot require an internet connection. The admin your water leak detector connects into can (and arguably should) alert you even when you are away from home, but the leak detector _itself_ cannot do that and be certified.
> A lot of zigbee infrastructure also expect an internet connection.
Like what. I have several hundred zigbee devices of almost all category you can think of, and I have never come across such a requirement. I don't understand how that would even work.
Any reason you prefer Matter rather than Zigbee? Zigbee has been a thing far longer than Matter, so I don't think the "one more standard" criticism is valid here.
It is supposedly an open source standard that do not requires internet connection to work, and can use regular wifi (2,4ghz) networks as a means to connect devices so you do not need to buy a hub for them. You can create your own hub with a mini pc for instance with a regular wifi card. No need for specific hardware
I was cautiously optimistic when Matter/Thread was in its early days, but predictably as with most of these industry backed standards it’s turned into another pay to play walled garden. The CSA seems to be particularly bad at this.
Cant wait to see in subsequent years all the additional e-waste when manufacturers consider devices obsolete, and no one can repurpose them because of Matter spec mandating secure boot.
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