TECH BRIEF
Major players join forces to get into your home.
Major players join forces to enable an open-source smart home
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the ZigBee Alliance have joined up to form Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP), with the aim of developing a framework for the integrated smart home. The ZigBee Alliance was formed in 2002; its main work until now was to look after the ZigBee standard of low-power radio and personal area networks – the kind of gear the smart home needs (the name is from the dance honeybees do when returning to the hive, if you were wondering).
This new organisation has a simple enough goal: to produce a standard open-source, royalty-free, certified internet protocol for the smart home. There is a mess of standards at the moment – most gear uses a proprietary system, and so is tethered to a home network using dedicated proxies and translators. The plan is that ultimately you’ll be able to use almost any devices seamlessly; your smart speaker will work with all your other smart devices, from the lighting to the security alarms, heating, and so forth, regardless of who made them.
The new protocol won’t replace existing standards – this is no Wi-Fi or Ethernet rival – but rather it will work alongside existing protocols to make sure they co-operate at a fundamental level. It won’t standardise user interfaces or suchlike, only the communication between devices. It will initially concentrate on Amazon’s Alexa Smart Home, Google’s Weave, Apple’s HomeKit, and ZigBee’s Dotdot. The organisation’s webpage gives little away; it doesn’t even appear to have a logo yet. It says that “the project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use.” It stresses the security aspect, claiming it is a “fundamental design tenet” of the new standards. Given the number of recent breaches, that’s comforting.
Good news? Yes. The current patchwork of systems is frustrating, and a standard is an obvious step forward. It won’t matter which smart speaker you buy, they should all work. The smart home is a huge growth area. The smart speaker market has grown from just under 114 million units sold in 2018, to over 205 million last year, and is still growing rapidly. Smart lighting was worth a little under $11.5 billion in 2018, and is predicted to grow at over 20 percent a year. It’s a similar story with other sectors; every graph shows a strong upward curve.
The Internet of Things is arriving quickly. Now we have an organisation to ensure co-operation, it’s a wonder we didn’t have one earlier. Initially, the winners are likely to be Amazon and Google. Apple has a few hundred devices for its HomeKit; Google has over 10,000 smart home compatible devices; Amazon has over 80,000.
It’s easy to be cynical, so let’s do that: Big companies only co-operate when they think the outcome, and therefore profits, will be better. Witness Apple and Qualcomm. The two were at each other’s throats over 5G patents, with billion-dollar lawsuits flying about. The spat lasted over a year, and must have consumed a fortune in lawyer’s fees. Then, suddenly, peace reigned. The two shook hands, and settled everything remarkably quickly. Why? Because Apple needed the 5G chips as Intel pulled out of the market, and Qualcomm wanted a big customer. Amazon and Google are not exactly good friends, but commercial reality trumps everything.
The goal of CHIP is to help the growth of the smart home market, and fragmentation doesn’t help anybody. Last year, 530 million smart home devices were shipped; it has been estimated that the figure will rise to 1.6 billion by 2024, so there will be plenty of pie to go around. As well as making money from selling hardware and subscriptions, the smart home market is going to be a data-collecting gold mine; marketing data is valuable stuff, witness the profits Facebook has made. That’s a whole different issue, though...
The first draft of the Project CHIP standard is due before the end of the year. It is expected to concentrate on Wi-Fi, up to Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth Low Energy. Ethernet and cellular specifications will follow that. In a few years, the majority of smart home gear will be fully compatible with the new standard, and we’ll have halfforgotten that there was a time when it wasn’t so.