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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

no, thread is a rebranding (and evolution) of the zigbee protocol, which is a low-power, local mesh network with no inherent internet connectivity. zigbee/thread devices work offline first, with switches that are an integral part of the local mesh network. these devices can also be connected to the internet through a hub/border router, if you so choose. matter is the umbrella brand name for the combo of BLE, wifi, and thread that provides a complete IoT ecosystem.

i have a bunch of zigbee devices (mostly ikea tradfri) that i'm eager to upgrade in the hopes that i get more reliability and speed out of my connected devices (mostly lighting).

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Why the HELL do companies and whatnot keep rebranding from something INSANELY EASY to search like Zigbee to something ENTIRELY GENERIC like thread?

explodes

Because they didn't. The only thing that Thread shares with Zigbee is the radio. It's a completely different standard.

Zigbee Alliance renamed themselves to the CSA. Can companies still keep making Zigbee devices after Matter? Sure, it's not impossible, but it's not really going to happen much more than somebody producing anything else obsolete.

The fact of the matter is that Zigbee isn't competing with Matter, it's being replaced with Matter. Rebranding may not be the best choice of words, but I think you're missing the point.

Confederate States of America? Ballsy move.

because they do not want you searching for protocol compatiblity, they want you to lock into a vendor

they want you to look for "Alexa" or "Google Home" or "Apple HomeKit" labels, not "Zigbee" or "thread" or "zwave"

I suspect it is desirable as one is supposed to search for the marketed products. The magic smoke that binds the device to the app or blinky lights is of little importance.

At least it wasn't Nintendo in charge of the naming, then it would be New ZigBee.

If it was MS, it would start as ZigbeeSpecial 1, followed by ZigBee 5 and be incompatible with ZigBee 3.0

edit: Just in case anyone is not following C# developments

Old: .NET 1.0 … -> .NET 4.7 -> .NET 4.8

New and not compatible: dotnetcore 1 … -> dotnetcore 3 -> .NET 5

And of course, there is their ORM which did not drop the "core" part, so for .NET 4.8 there is Entity Framework 6, the version for .NET 5 is called Entity Framework Core and reached 6 as well last year. For ASP.NET (that is, on .NET 4.8) MVC 5 is the current MVC solution, I think for ASP.NET Core (.NET 5) MVC 6 might be, but despite actually working with those technologies, I’m not sure.

ZigBii

Drop formerly MassDrop, Wise formerly TransferWise

Stating that Thread is a rebranding of Zigbee is incorrect. Both are based on 802.15.4 for their physical layer but the two are entirely separate and managed by different standards bodies (Zigbee under the Zigbee Alliance, now CSA - Thread under the Thread Group). Where some confusion may come is that Matter is now also under the CSA (just like Zigbee).

while you're technically correct, it's a rebranding from the (zigbee) consumer's perspective, via the CSA being a rebranding of the zigbee alliance. within that context, thread is the most direct analog of the zigbee protocol, as they're both implementations of 802.15.4 for low-power local mesh. consumers won't need to (and most won't want to) understand it deeper than that.

Matter/thread is nothing like zigbee, except the MAC layer is the same. For one, Thread uses IP(v6), and Zigbee does not use IP at all. This will make managing thread networks much more like managing normal networks (hopefully).

I don't know why you think your zigbee devices will be upgradeable to thread - that strikes me as quite unlikely, although perhaps physically possible depending on how much hardware offload the devices use.

> Matter/thread is nothing like zigbee, except the MAC layer is the same.

Matter actually uses an iteration of the Zigbee device model - from an application level they are actually somewhat similar

> I don't know why you think your zigbee devices will be upgradeable to thread - that strikes me as quite unlikely

Most Zigbee radios are dual Zigbee/Thread since both protocols are build on 802.15.4. I suspect that the limitation is going to be on manufacturers rather than hardware limitations

If all they do is connect to the hub and then the hub controls all external access then that's fine. I'm just unclear as to why there is so much talk about IPv6/cloud/TCP/UDP for something that is only talking to a local hub. I mean I totally get you can use all of that (save for "cloud") 100% locally but if that were the case I'd expect more mention of that. I'm ok with using wifi-adjacent for communication, internally but I do not all my "thread" devices to have internet access (local or external).

The idea of thread is that it is basically IPv6 over Zigbee, in the form of 6LoWPAN which is an IPv6 stack optimized for low-power devices with an addressing, discovery, and routing mechanism designed to work well on mesh networks like Zigbee.

To some extent, Thread and Matter are direct replacements for Z-wave at different levels of the stack. There are some different pros/cons between the two though. The major advantage of 6LoWPAN is that it shares a lot of the design and implementation with existing network stacks and can be carried directly over IP networks. This is expected to make more complex 6LoWPAN topologies much easier to implement (e.g. 6LoWPAN traffic can be easily forwarded over the internet by a gateway). None of this is really anything that can't be done with Z-wave, but 6LoWPAN makes it easier by having a lot of common design and implementation with ubiquitous IP stacks. Matter itself has the major advantage of being a newer and higher-level design than Z-Wave which should result in more consistent interoperability of a wider range of devices.

Z-wave will probably remain superior for battery-powered sensors into the future, because Thread doesn't allow for the extremely aggressive sleep schedules (e.g. sleep mode for 18 hours at a time between supervisions for security sensors) that Z-Wave does... although we can of course debate how wise it is to only perform supervision every 18 hours, even if UL allows it for burglar alarms.

I believe would be more accurate to say it's Zigbee over IPv6.

IIRC Zigbee is: 802.15.4 -> "Zigbee"

And my (mostly incomplete) understanding of matter is it's: 802.15.4 -> 6LoWPAN -> Thread -> "The device model of Zigbee"-like Application Layer (for thread devices)

I'm using the terminology in a confusing way. Thread and Zigbee are both protocols on top of 802.15.4, but to be fair to myself there is a really common tendency to refer to "bare" 802.15.4 as Zigbee mostly because of the history. Zigbee is a very "thin" protocol though compared to Thread which is a lot more ambitious, but at the same time Zigbee goes more into application space... which kind of makes the point that Thread and Matter are a lot more "detailed" than Zigbee, which is minimalistic to the degree that interoperability of Zigbee products has always been very poor. This is one of the major reasons that Z-Wave mostly replaced Zigbee in the "smart home" space. It standardizes more functionality that Zigbee does. Thread and particularly Matter, in turn, standardize even more than Z-Wave (e.g. many of the things that are Z-wave config "mystery registers" that vary between manufacturers are included in Matter specs).

> This is one of the major reasons that Z-Wave mostly replaced Zigbee in the "smart home" space.

It did? I moved into a new home a year ago and have been outfitting it with smart devices. I have no real preference for Zigbee but ended up with a bunch of Zigbee devices and zero Z-Wave devices.

Me too, after getting two battery powered Wi-Fi enabled devices which are rather inconvenient. Z-Wave is somewhat better if you have a big house or many neighbours with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi APs using the spectrum because it operates on the 868/908 MHz ISM band instead of the 2.4 GHz ISM band used by Zigbee and shared with Wi-Fi and BT devices. Lower frequency waves travel more easily through thick walls and further and the 868/908 band is also subject to airtime restrictions in order to prevent interference. ZigBee uses repeaters and more frequent updates to accomplish the same thing. Most wall plug powered ZigBee devices are also repeaters. You'll probably get more samples from battery powered ZigBee sensors than from devices either using Z-Wave (which has airtime limitations) or Wi-Fi (which is power hungry and the devices are in deep sleep most of the time).

> Bluetooth Low Energy for provisioning via a QR code, while it relies on Wi-Fi for high-data rate connectivity and Thread for low-data-rate communications.

They will only use "thread" for low data rate communications. They will all have Wi-Fi. thus the ipv6/cloud/tcp/udp talk.

I want _just_ thread out of these things. I want my devices to talk to my zwave/zigbee/thread network and to not talk to the cloud without my permission.

> They will all have Wi-Fi.

AFAICT, devices that don't need high-data rate connectivity aren't required to have WiFi. IOW a thread camera will have WiFi but a thread light switch doesn't have to.

If some devices aren't required to have WiFi, then how do they effectively mesh with other devices? If I have a camera on the far side of my house, and then have a daisy chain of light switches back to my hub... the camera can communicate over zigbee/thread back to the hub to get low data instructions. and all the switches can get on/off commands.... but the camera has to communicate all the way back to the hub via WiFi. Which makes the WiFi not really a mesh, but a standard WiFi connect to the hub.

And I assume there is no way to make sure that the camera never connects to the internet without setting up firewall rules on my router. Because the announcement specifically calls out the ability for smart devices to phone home as a perk, I imagine blocking devices from phoning home isn't an option, and you have to assume that any device with WiFi will attempt to phone home even if it's not "smart".

If there was a way on hubs to have mobile phone like permissions. "This device can use local WiFi" and "This device can access the internet for Smart stuff" as separate permissions, I might be ok. But since most WiFi IoT devices are dumb and just punch a tunnel through your firewall so you can access them with a mobile app and wind up in botnets, I don't have a lot of faith in IoT companies to do it right, so until I can be assured (and verify myself) that WiFi doesn't mean "can phone home", theres no way in hell Im going to use Matter wifi devices.

> If some devices aren't required to have WiFi, then how do they effectively mesh with other devices?

Thread is a mesh protocol. They won’t wifi mesh a camera.

> Which makes the WiFi not really a mesh, but a standard WiFi connect to the hub.

Yea.

> Because the announcement specifically calls out the ability for smart devices to phone home as a perk

It is a perk to some.

> until I can be assured (and verify myself) that WiFi doesn't mean "can phone home", theres no way in hell Im going to use Matter wifi devices.

Some devices will some won’t. Surely some devices will advertise being local only. Some companies won’t won’t the expense of a server.

Some matter devices won’t need wifi at all (lights). You might be more comfortable with them instead of writing it all off.

> wind up in botnets

Ironically cheaper devices may bet better off here. They’re probably too cheap to use anything but embedded code instead of embedded Linux so there’s less attack surface (excluding vendor provided).

Matter provides a secure channel to share OTA updates (eg through a thread hub) that is signed by the vendor. So this should be a step in the right direction in terms of security.

yup, i should have noted that wrinkle in my original comment. some devices will have wifi connectivity built in because they need the bandwidth (and maybe the wider access too), but many won't, because they don't need the bandwidth nor the higher power consumption that comes with it. zigbee/thread-only devices can't route to the wider internet directly because of protocol differences, which is why it needs the border router, but obviously wifi connected devices can. what matter does is standardizes this combo behavior across devices for interoperability.

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