Matter Is The Future Of Your Smart Home, But What Is It?

Setting up a smart home is not an easy experience. While the best smart home devices claim to be easy to add to your existing setup, the reality is very different. Until now, there was no universal communication standard for smart homes; Smart home devices are designed to work with some platforms, but not all. Enter Matter, the solution to the clutter that is smart home communications. But what does that mean for your smart home?

ANDROID POLICE VIDEO OF THE DAY

The idea behind Matter is simple: you buy a new smart home device, plug it in, and then seamlessly connect it to any smart home app. Materia is the standard that the device uses to communicate with your app and other devices. It has been in development for over two years and the goal is to have the first Matter-certified devices by the end of 2022. It's not without its flaws, however.

What is the goal and how did we get there?

Search for the thread for a while and you will come across the term "thread". Speaking of cables, if you've been upgrading your home for years, chances are you've got a Zigbee hub.

Zigbee is one of the existing standards to connect smart home devices in a mesh network. Although Zigbee can enable smart home devices to communicate with each other, it presents a critical hurdle: the devices cannot communicate directly with each other and require a device to relay the communication. Sure, a homeowner can have the best smart home devices. But they can't automate them en masse unless they pay for the valuable output space of a receiving radio.

It turns out that the conglomerate behind the Matter standard evolved from the same business alliance that created Zigbee, and they found a way to solve the problem of ordering a hub via Thread.

Thread is the wireless smart home communication protocol that forms the backbone of Matter. It's been around for a few years, but back then it wasn't widely accepted. However, it offers many advantages over other older wireless protocols like Zigbee.

First, since no central hub is required, users can remove and add devices without worrying about terrorizing the network. This means there is no single point of failure; If one device fails, the others must continue to function. We'll see a little bit how it works.

Second, Thread is based on proven open protocols that maximize interoperability with other standards. In addition to Thread's unique peer-to-peer networking method, Matter can also rely on Wi-Fi to wirelessly connect devices between different (possibly open) networks.

More importantly, Thread's use of IPv6 enables connectionless connectivity between Thread networks and other IPv6 networks, such as Wi-Fi, and is also compatible with other Thread-recommended standards, including HomeKit. Zigbee devices receive a 16-bit tag that the hub must translate into an IP address to connect to IPv6 networks.

The startup improves on Zigbee's shortcomings by addressing what made Zigbee so great, namely low power consumption, low latency and the use of open standards. Thread has many other benefits, but like Matter's core, it promises to become a milestone in the evolution of the smart home.

And the problem?

Although Materia was a powerful smart home upgrade when it was released, it still had some issues. Although the radio standard is not destroyed, they prove that the new standard is not perfect.

As mentioned above, Thread does not require a central hub to function. There's a catch, though: In an interview with The Verge, Jonathan Hui, Thread's VP of Technology and Google's senior software engineer, noted that while Thread devices don't need to communicate over a router Wi-Fi network, they can. Use border routers when devices on different networks need to communicate with each other. Edge routers allow Thread network devices to communicate with external network and cloud devices. Therefore, Matter requires an edge router to connect Thread devices to each other and to the internet.

The good news is that you don't have to buy an additional Wi-Fi router; A Threaded device that is meant to be always on can act as an edge router. You can keep your Nanoleaf Smart Lights on for more than looks. But unless you have a very smart home network, you probably need a border router for smart devices like Google Nest or Sonos Move. That won't be a big deal for some, although to use Matter you need to know what devices you're including in your smart home and where you're placing them.

A minor downside has to do with something we mentioned above - fiber is a low-power standard, you won't find it in high-bandwidth devices. Newer security cameras are generally non-wired, which means they won't work with Matter devices. Fortunately, this is the only significant gap between use cases. Fridges, lightbulbs, and similar devices don't handle large streams of data, so you'll almost certainly see Thread and Matter support.

Materia and Filo seem like a big step forward for smart homes

Where will we see matter? Good luck everywhere. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple have publicly announced plans to bring Matter to existing and future smart home devices. In fact, Apple's HomePod mini will support Matter at launch. This is fantastic news and we won't have to wait long for a unified smart home once Matter is released.

Despite the problems, Matter promises to standardize smart home connectivity technologies with less effort and more redundancy. If it arrives smoothly and smart home device makers continue to support the standard, consumers can buy new smart home devices without worrying about malfunctions or malfunctions. However, the introduction of a new standard can be a significant investment for owners and can also lead to problems. later this year we will better understand what the problem is.