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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

I really wish these were Matter over Thread without a hub. I'm just looking at adding sensors to a home that already has Nest Wifi for the border routers and I don't really want to add any other hubs to the mix.

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Indeed. In all fairness, the hub works really well. I have a few bulbs and switches from Ikea, and I control everything through the Home app on my iPhone. Last week I got an outlet from Ikea. As soon as I added it to the hub, it showed up in the Home app. Matter FTW!

I agree, but delays seem to be the norm with Matter.

Doesn't Matter run over Thread? I thought it was just an application protocol not a physical connectivity protocol.

Thread builds on the same physical layer as Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4; the big difference is unlike Zigbee it also incorporates IPv6. The physical layer is important for low power mesh networks, like the sensors and switches here- and WiFi is way, way more power hungry. That said, Matter supports WiFi too.

Matter runs over IPv6, over either Thread or WiFi.

The downside is that WiFi devices have far worse battery life, and WiFi doesn't really work well for this use case WiFi just isn't meant to have tens of devices all competing.

Also, you wrote matter over thread, but the thread is the same as zigbee. From the rest of your post you mean matter over WiFi.

Why are you saying that Thread is the same as Zigbee? AFAIK they are competing low-power, wireless mesh standards.

My understanding is that Thread is basically Zigbee Next. Better in some ways, can run on most of the same hardware (assuming there's firmware available but not at the same time), and unfortunately not backwards compatible. We'll be stuck having to run both Zigbee and Thread (and wifi, zwave, bluetooth, etc.) from here until eternity.

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