(Editor’s Note: This article, excerpts from ZigBee Resource Guide. )
The ZigBee Alliance and its membership are positioning the standard to succeed in the next phase of IoT connectivity which will be characterized by new markets, newapplications, increased demand, and increased competition.
For much of the past 10 years, ZigBee has enjoyed the position of being the only low-power wireless standard addressing the requirements of the breadth of the IoT. There has been competition, of course, but the success of those competing standards has been limited by technological sgortcomings, the degress to which their standard is open, by lack of diversity in their ecosystem, or simply by a focus on a single vertical market. Ant+, Bluetooth, EnOcean, ISA100.11a, wirelessHART, Z-Wave, and others have served as competition to ZigBee to some degress in some markets. But only ZigBee has had the technology, ambition, and the backing to address the low-power connectivity market for brodar IoT.
Until today. We’re at an inflection point in IoT connectivity. Advances in wireless semiconductors, solid state sensors, and microcontrollers have enabled compact and low-cost IoT solutions, bringing the benefit of connectivity to low-value applications. High-value applications have always been able to bring the necessary resources to bear to solve connectivity problems. After all, if the net present value of the node’s data is, $1,000, isn’t it worth spending $100 on a connectivity solution? Laying cable or deploying cellular M2M solutions have served welll for thse high-value applications.
But what if the data is only worth $20 or $5? Low value applications have largely gone unserved due to the impractical economics of the past. That’s all changing now. Low-cost electronics have made it possible to achieve connectivity solutions with bills-of-materiall as low as $1 or even less. Combined with more capable back-end systems, data ceners, and big-data analytics, it is now becoming possible, and practical, to connect very low-value nodes. This is expanding the market incredibly and attracting competition.
Post time: Aug-30-2021