Hacker News Reader

Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

Considering Apple, Amazon, and Google are already members of the Zigbee alliance, it makes you wonder why it had to be a new working group and not a new group within Zigbee.

Its like saying Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots, and the NFL join together to create a new football league.

View on HN

I think the keyword is "over IP". My understanding is that Zigbee works at the lower layers.

> My understanding is that Zigbee works at the lower layers.

Zigbee is not IP. It's a completely different network, which is why many Zigbee based solutions often require a hub/gateway (which speaks both IP and Zigbee) to enable control via smart-phone apps or stuff like that.

To be honest, I'm pretty happy about that. The less my smart-devices has to do with my local wifi/LAN, the happier I am.

Not really sure I like the direction this is heading.

I’ll probably end up firewalling off a zone just for this type of traffic in the future.

But that way they can still report back to the cloud, on top of what their actual function is.

In that regard I much prefer non-IP based devices.

I'd assume the average person has no clue what Zigbee is. I know I'd never heard of it

Not sure what the general state is now, but as a brand name it was one of the top most popular for at least a good year or two, back when I first got interested in home automation.

(The other two at the time were Z-Wave and X10, with X10 recommended against as obsolete/dying; I ended up settling on Z-Wave, so I stopped paying attention to Zigbee and other competitors)

From what I’ve read, Zigbee is for the rest of the world what Z-Wave is for the US, in terms of market share. Not sure how accurate that is, but from what I’ve seen, there are a lot more Zigbee devices here in Germany than Z-Wave, while most US sites talk about Z-Wave.

What Zigbee devices can you buy apart from Hue lamps? ZWave has been dominant for many years because there are hardly any Zigbee devices, be it in the US or in the EU. FWIW I'm in the Netherlands and have all ZWave, and when you look at e.g. the symcon.de forums, there are plenty of ZWave users in the EU (and Germany specifically).

IKEA Tradfri devices are probably the biggest user of ZigBee.

Xiaomi Aqara Amazon Echo Plus etc as a Zigbee hub Tradfri/HomeSmart from Ikea

I'm not sure I see much z-wave stuff (at least here in Australia)

Looking at amazon.de, I see switches, dimmers, thermostats, plugs, motion/humidity/pressure sensor and of course lights.

And Google Trends has zigbee far higher up than z-wave for google trends in Germany [0] vs USA [1}

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=DE&q=zigbee,z-w...

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=zigbee,z-w...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com