The Connected Home Industry is Coming Together
SmartThings Developers
We are thrilled at the recent announcement from Zigbee Alliance that its board members, including SmartThings, have created the Connected Home over IP working group that plans to develop a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to simplify development and increase compatibility for consumers.
Today marks an important step toward realizing our joint vision and commitment with our Alliance partners to bring Project Connected Home over IP to fruition. SmartThings has been working diligently with our Zigbee Alliance partners at Apple, Amazon, Comcast and Google to set the goals for the Working Group and we expect that Project Connected Home over IP will have the same effect for IoT devices that USB had for computer peripheral devices. Simply stated: Any compliant device will work with any platform over IP protocol networks like WiFi and Thread.
The implications for this project are far reaching; as new products are brought to market using the new technology, soon all devices will connect to all platforms. Our alliance is meaningful to our developers as the Connected Home over IP will spark innovation in the device market, where consumers will be able to purchase a connected home device without restriction on compatibility with any particular platform, encouraging differentiation of products and market growth for entrepreneurs and innovators.
At SmartThings, we are actively participating in the development of this new protocol and continuing to support our existing WWST protocols like Zigbee and Z-Wave. SmartThings Hub users can also expect this new protocol to work with nearly all existing models.
We are excited to be a key part of this important project. The effect of our success will lead to a more cohesive open IoT landscape. For 2020, we are looking forward to the innovations from our WWST partners and future partners as they build new devices in this expanding, open ecosystem.
