(Editor’s Note: This article, excerpts from ZigBee Resource Guide. )
The way breed of competition is formidable. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Thread have all set their sights on the low-power IoT. Importantly, these standards have had the benefits of observing what has worked and what hasn’t worked for ZigBee, increasing their chances of success and reducing the time needed to develop a viable solution.
Thread wa designed from the ground up to serve the needs of the resoource-constrained IoT . Low power consumption, mesh topology, native IP support, and good security are key characteristics of the standard. Having been developed by many of the tended to take the best of ZigBee and improve upon it. Key to Thread’s strategy is end-to-end IP support and that is the pribition is the smart home, but there is no reason to believe it will stop there if it’s successful.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are potentially even more worriesome for ZigBee. Bluetooth started preparing to address the IoT market at least six years ago when they added Bluetooth Low Energy to version 4.0 of the core specification and later this year the 5.0 revision will add increased range and speed, resolving key shortcomings. Around the same time, the Blurtooth SIG will introduce mesh networking standards, which will be backward compatible with silicon designed for the 4.0 verion of the spec. Reports indicate that the first version of Blurtooth mesh will be a flood-powered applications such as lighting, an early traget market for Bluetooth Mesh. A second version of the mesh standard will add routing capability, allowing low-power leaf nodes to remain asleep while other (hopefully mains-powered) nodes perform message handling.
The Wi-Fi Alliance is late to the low-power IoT party, but like Blurtooth, it has ubiquitoous brand recognition and an enormous ecosystem to help bring it up to speed quickly. The Wi-Fi Alliance announced Halow, built on the sub-Ghz 802.11ah standard, in January 2016 as their entry into the crowded filed of IoT standards. Holaw has serious abstacles to overcome. The 802.11ah specification has yet to be approved and a Halow certification program is not expected until 2018, so it is years behind competing standards. More importantly, in order to leverage the power of the Wi-Fi ecosystem, Halow needs a large installed base of Wi-Fi access points that support 802.11ah. That means the makers of broadband gateways, wireless routers, and access points need to add a new spectrum band to their products, adding cost and complexity. And sub-Ghz bands aren’t universal like the 2.4GHz band, so manufactures will need to comprehend the regulatory idiosyncrasies of dozens of countries in their products. Will that happen? Perhaps. Will it happen in time for Halow to be successful? Time will tell.
Some dismiss Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as recent interlopers in a market they don’t understand and aren’t equipped to address. That is a mistake. The history of connectivity is littered with the corpses of incumbent, technologically superior standards which have had the misfortune of being in the path of a connectivity behemoth ssuch as Ethernrt, USB, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth. These “invasive species” use the power of their installed base to gain competitive advantage in adjuscent markets, co-opting the technology of their rivals and leveraging economies of scale to crush opposition. (As a former evangelist for FireWire, the author is painfully aware of the dynamic.)
Post time: Sep-09-2021