Market leader in smart home products plan IP-based connectivity standard

Market leader in smart home products plan IP-based connectivity standard

New York, 18.12.2019

Apple, Amazon, Google and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the introduction of a new IP-based connectivity standard for smart home products, focusing on greater compatibility, security and simplified development for manufacturers.

Zigbee Alliance board members such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify, Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian will also contribute to the project.

Project Connected Home over IP“ aims to help device manufacturers build devices that are compatible with smart homes and voice services such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and others by defining a specific set of IP-based network technologies for device certification.

The new standard will integrate existing smart home technologies such as Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Weave and Thread. They will bring in two of their market-proven open source smart home technologies, Weave and Thread. Both are based on IP and have been integrated into millions of homes around the world. Weave, an application protocol, works across many networks including thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low energy and even mobile. Even if the devices are in different networks, Weave allows them all to work together securely.

The new connectivity standard will be open source and royalty-free, with the code maintained on GitHub. The working group aims to publish a draft specification and a preliminary reference implementation by the end of 2020.

For consumers, this should ultimately lead to more intelligent home accessories supporting multiple platforms such as HomeKit and Alexa.