“What Matter, Matters In Future Home Automation.”
Editor’s Note
Are you doing a major renovation or building a new house, is it time to build in a charging station now for your next car and what about Matter?
As the world evolves so does home automation with tired old systems such as Control 4 set to be made redundant after some of the biggest Companies in the world including Apple, Amazon, Google and hundreds of brands that make home automation products getting behind a new open platform called Matter.
This is a technology that allows different products from different brands to talk to each other seamlessly across a broadband network.
Home automation is at a crossroads, solar and managing power are key to homes today along with low cost open standards that allow both value and premium products to talk to each other.
We know electric cars are coming but when Germany's Daimler announced this month that its Mercedes-Benz brand would “be ready to go all-electric at the end of the decade where market conditions allow”, it showed the revolution is now very close.
Moreover from 2025, all of MercedesBenz's “newly-launched vehicle architectures will be electric-only.”
Other brands are also moving to all electric vehicles which means homes will need charging stations built into garages, and this will be a problem for all those people that don't have a garage.
Even apartment blocks are going to have to build in power charging stations and that could be part of a rental bill in the future.
And who will you buy your broadband and power through? It could well be Telstra who are moving to link their extensive mobile phone and broadband networks to market power usage for homes.
In the home everything in the future could be linked via the Matter network including your car.
One example of the strength of Matter is that Amazon's Echo smart speakers are about to get a lot smarter. An upgrade to Matter – an open-source standard platform will allow Alexa to also work with Google and several other voice assistants.
Matter is the new name for Project Connected Home over IP (or CHIP for short), and it's set to become a key player in the home automation market eliminating the need for expensive and often proprietary systems such as Control 4.
One only has to look at the board make up to see that this standard has some fire power behind them with representatives from the likes of Amazon, Apple, ASSA ABLOY, Comcast, Google, Huawei, IKEA, Legrand, Lutron Electronics, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, SmartThings, Somfy, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Tuya, and Wulian now on the new management team.
Right now, we are facing a new revolution and like the early days of the mobile phone there will be winners and losers, Nokia and Erikson missed out because they were too slow to recognise the importance of the internet.
This allowed Apple and then Samsung to take their market share in the mobile phone market, and this is what is going to happen with Companies operation in the proprietary home automation world.