The Connectivity Standards Alliance Announces Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi

The standards side of things is true, however this can be largely solved by providing a reference implementation, given that no device manufacturer is going to implement the stack from scratch. Automated testing of firmware would also work. As for high conformance... WiFi and BT devices manage to work well enough by simply buying a tested chipset and building on that, no external testing/fees necessary.

I understand the certification if a manufacturer wants to sell a product commercially as 'Matter Certified'. For hobbyists or smaller players, pulling the reference implementation, loading it onto a cheap MCU, and calling it 'Works with Matter' would suffice.

As it stands, the latter isn't an option, because of the codesigning they've shoehorned into the spec. And for all the noise made about security, once connected to the hub the manufacturer can run whatever they like on it and send data back to their servers with very little visibility to the user.

Thread is arguably the interesting part for low power devices, and doesn't force certification. Matter is little more than a protocol spec, at the tradeoff of locked down devices and annual fees. For Matter over WiFi, I can't see any point whatsoever in using it. And for the costs of Doing Matter/Thread certification most smaller hardware startups will balk at the hundreds of thousands required to do so, and stick with WiFi/BT/Zigbee/Thread + roll their own protocol/app.

Certification is desirable to me, so long as it doesn't mandate taking away the freedom of the owners of devices for local control and the ability to install whatever software they want on those devices.

I had no idea that Matter/Thread mandates secure boot. Presumably that's secure boot without end user freedom to load their own keys. That's no good.

Standards conformance is one thing. But to guard against manufacturer end-of-support and/or bankruptcy there must be provisions for adversarial interoperability too, which I believe is currently lacking. This is not the case in other, even commercial systems like KNX, where while the configuration tools are paid and proprietary, communication between devices works based on well-defined types and “registers” and any device can interact with any other regardless of the manufacturer’s wish, ensuring cross-manufacturer compatibility even in case of manufacturer failure.

This is why all the (commercial!) high-end home automation uses KNX, because installers can mix and match products and know they won’t get cornered even if a single manufacturer goes out of business.

(And if you want a cheaper system that can be operated with fully-free tools, you’re already covered, that’s ZigBee! But even KNX is “open” once you buy the license for ETS - the config tool - and then you can go to town on your system and reconfigure it at will.)

> Is there a way without certification that results in high conformance that consumers can rely on?

Sibling commenters have already answered this in the affirmative but a better question is: what examples can you give supporting your thesis that certification drives high conformance?

I'm likely in a bubble but most certification systems I've seen exist in highly "competitive" landscapes (read: competing standards) & exist purely to support an ecosystem of institutions relying solely on certification to make money & providing no other value back to the system (e.g. in the form of standards advocacy, conformance testing or even standards maintenance). To the point I've come to anecdotally equate "certification" with wild-west/scammy corporate practices.

So as far as I've seen certification often has the opposite effect that you propose. At least in the IT & software space.

> Is there a way without certification that results in high conformance that consumers can rely on?

Open source a reference implementation and a conformance test suite. Open, transparent, and low cost. Also, don't lock out devices that aren't blessed.

Working well for device manufacturers who want users to forklift out gear every few years?

I have been avoiding "IoT" in my home because I want stable 20+ year lifetimes for protocols and standards. I want to know that the outlets I hard-wire today will be controllable with whatever software I choose in 5, 10, 15 years. I want my thermostat to continue to have all its "smart" features for the lifetime of my HVAC system. I don't want separate "apps" for my washer, dishwasher, automatic water shut off, etc. I don't want Internet connectivity to servers that may be turned off at a manufacturer's whim to gatekeep features (or worse, basic functionality). The market is dysfunctional.

Does a device that provides an interface via a HTTP server need to pass any kind of TCP or HTTP certification?

Maybe I'm making some category error here but I can think of dozens of protocols that do not require certification.

> The model seems to work.

It "works" in the sense that it excels at separating implementors from their money and locking up end users in a cage, sure.

The sub-GHz Suzi is for LPWAN or Low Power Wide Area Network, similar to LoRa, SigFox and Wi-Fi HaLow.

LoRa PHY is proprietary by Semtech but LoRaWAN the data link layer is open, that's why the manufacturers aren't just making LoRa radios.

SigFox is full-stack proprietary LPWAN solution but the founding company already went south.

Currently the main open standard alternative to LoRa is IEEE Wi-Fi HaLow.

The main problem with these LPWAN standards, however, is that all of them struggling with limited Line-of-Sight (LoS) or Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) LoS environment that's very common in LPWAN. For example LoRa is very low power but its limited chirp spread spectrum (CSS) based modulation is bad for any limited LoS environment. In addition, its spreading factor (SF) only work for a single channel per user.

I'm now working on the LPWAN PHY alternative that's much better for very limited LoS than LoRa. Looking forward to benchmark against Suzi.

> An example - how long has Matter existed? Yet, it hasn't had a profile for smart plugs with energy monitoring (eg the 12$ IKEA one). Such a basic use case...

That was added with version 1.3 of Matter, released in the middle of this year. You just need to wait for your smart home ecosystem to support it and for IKEA to release a firmware update.

As far as ecosystems go, Home Assistant (HA) fully supports it, as does Samsung SmartThings. Google has a public beta, from what I've read. Amazon and Apple are in the on the way stage.

As far as device goes, all my energy monitoring smart plugs are Tp-link Tapo, and they have been quick to update firmware. I'm using several Tp-Link Tapo P110M Matter smart plugs [1] and a Tapo P316M Matter smart power strip [2] with HA.

The P316M, purchased in the middle of October, came with firmware that supported Matter 1.3 out of the box. I simply added it to HA using the "Add device" button on the HA screen and it worked.

The P110Ms, purchased at the start of this month, came with older firmware so they did not show energy use out of the box in HA. A quick trip to the Tapo app to add them to it during which it checks for and installs the latest firmware, brought them up to the latest firmware. After that the energy monitoring information showed up in HA.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKG52WQ4

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F5LNYTR7

Yeah, same. Zigbee hits the sweet spot of offline and just interoperable enough. Matter has added so many features that I might as well just use WiFi devices, and it doesn't sound like the consortium has the customer's best interests in mind.

Yeah, I can just not wrap my brain around the Thread and Matter push. Zigbee works great, devices are affordable, there are many devices out there already. Also people who already have Zigbee will have to build an additional Thread mesh. This all seems so pointless unless there is another motive.

Zigbee is indeed good enough. The issue is that it solves the problem well enough and doesn't allow for maximizing how much customers are milked for. So customers will always choose Zigbee over any other option that also solves the problem plus some useless features, less control, and increased security surface area.

There is a very clear signal that is easy to pick up: either you support zigbee in your IoT device or you are trying to undermine the customer. No customer wants to be undermined. This should make Zigbee support a very easy choice for companies operating in a competitive space. Simply succeeding in the market should be enough and if it isn't that is the company's existential challenge.

Oh cool it's not just me doing exactly this.

Sticking to pure zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt and slae.sh's excellent USB coordinator. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of spare IKEA zigbee devices before they go out of stock. Around 2030 I'll take a look if thread/matter is anywhere near mature and has settled.

> Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.

The only worry is if manufacturers stop developing Zigbee products. Ikea for example made cheap and good Zigbee devices but they've said they're moving away from Zigbee.

"Matter" can in practice also mean "Matter over Wi-Fi", and lots of vendors use it that way.

As someone who's run (and continues to run) both ZWave and Zigbee networks for over 10 years I find the direction of Zigbee rather frustrating. They used to be the antithesis of Zwave with it's frustrating "licensing" and now seems to be as though they're towing that line. Most likely because they got in bed with Google, Apple and the garbage that is Matter.

Pairing worked flawlessly with my Tado X thermostats, to add another anecdotal data point.

> not enough v4 IPs

No one is giving their IoT devices public IPv4 addresses. They would be behind a NAT. RFC 1918 provides 17,891,322 usable IP addresses for each private network. If we want to be a little more adventurous, RFC 6598 provides an additional 4,194,302 usable addresses and 240.0.0.0/4 is another 268,435,454 usable addresses "reserved for future use" since 1989, but still sitting unused so we can use them as internal addresses inside a NAT anyway (for example, AWS uses this range internally).

Show me a network that is using all 290,521,078 addresses and I'll show you a network managed by a team of network engineers who can just set up IPv6.

Don't use IPv4 and NAT < firewall.

Why would IP based routing be inherently more power hungry?

Thread uses IPv6.

> I'd also really like to see affirmations that Matter is usable sans any big network, sans Google Apple and whomever else. That it really is something we can run ourselves.

I'm using Matter (over Thread, mostly) with Home Assistant – in addition to using it with Apple HomeKit, but I could have done it exclusively HA. My devices get an IPv6 ULA from the border router, HA can directly talk to them without any internet or cloud involved. Does this qualify?

It's true that certain non-standardized features are only available through "extensions" ie. the device vendor app. But both Thread and Matter get new revisions, and the devices get firmware updates in a standard way (again, installable via Home Assistant) to take advantage of new features and stability updates. All of this has gotten better with time.

But the best thing about Matter is that I'm not locked into a specific ecosystem or dependent on an app from the device vendor. So, in my view it has been a slow start but with steady improvement. And the right direction IMHO.

A lot of zigbee infrastructure also expect an internet connection.

These border routers also double as admins, and people want their smart home stuff to be available while they are outside their home network.

Thread devices can mandate internet connectivity the same way Wifi devices can.

Matter defines profiles and does certification that says your light bulbs cannot require an internet connection. The admin your water leak detector connects into can (and arguably should) alert you even when you are away from home, but the leak detector _itself_ cannot do that and be certified.

It is supposedly an open source standard that do not requires internet connection to work, and can use regular wifi (2,4ghz) networks as a means to connect devices so you do not need to buy a hub for them. You can create your own hub with a mini pc for instance with a regular wifi card. No need for specific hardware