One of the biggest hurdles to setting up a smart home has been the lack of a universal standard. It’s been like this from the early days, when manufacturers began producing products that would only work with their own hubs. For the first time, though, tech companies have rallied around a single smart home technology standard.
It’s All About Matter
The standard finally unifying smart home technology is Matter, created by the Connectivity Standards Alliance. It’s something device makers will be able to follow when building smart home devices that can talk to other devices. With a few key announcements, Matter is finally setting Echo, Nest, SmartThings, and HomeKit in the same direction.
This standard will run on the Thread radio protocol, already used by HomeKit and others. It also supports Wi-Fi, but Thread offers a more low-power network while still using very little bandwidth and maintaining low-latency.
CSA always meant for Matter to become the smart home standard. It would mean you can control a Google Home from HomeKit, for example, as long as both supported Matter. Google and Apple have already pledged support for the Matter standard.
New Announcements from Big Names in Smart Home Technology
More recently, more of the big players have announced their smart home technology devices will support Matter. Samsung announced Matter support across its SmartThings, Galaxy, and Family Hub appliance product catalogs, and now Amazon has jumped on board.
With the addition of Amazon’s support, that means Echo devices and eero Wi-Fi routers will all support Matter. Even though Matter-supported devices won’t hit the marketuntil 2022, this latest news means the major smart home suppliers will all use the same standard.
On top of these major names in smart home technology, some of the best device-makers are already working on Matter-supported devices. Among them are Eve, Yale, Wemo, and Schlage.
I am all in on Homekit. I wonder if all of my door locks, switches and smart plugs will still work with Matter or do I need to buy updated gizmos?
My problem with Homekit has been that my modem/router has been so glitchy that my switches and smart plugs all seem to get knocked offline intermittently and sometimes I have to actually go and re-link them to get them back online.
My modem/router is horrible. I think that perhaps I should upgrade to a new network thingy.
Any thoughts on what is stable?
I just dropped Xfinity (comcast) in favor of an Arris Modem for internet and Eero pro 6 mesh hubs because they have ethernet connectors on each hub for 2 devices. I also subscribed to eero secure for network security for my iot items. I believe this will give all my iot items when connected to my mesh network. It’s been about 2 weeks and I’m happy to loose the high bills from Xfinity.
Jeff:
Great news.
About bloody time.