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The Matter standard arrived in October, promising a new era of compatibility and interoperability for smart-home tech.
Matter is the latest in a long line of protocols attempting to unite the smart home, many of which have struggled to gain traction largely because of lack of adoption or complexity in design. This time around, there’s hope from smart home developers that the broad buy-in around Matter will help make it successful—and if it does succeed, it will likely be because of a critical piece of technology called Thread.
Thread is the technological core of Matter, which smart-home experts have heralded as the next big step in smart-home adoption due to its potential to facilitate interoperability across different brands of smart-home devices.
The Connectivity Standards Alliance led the adoption of Matter in the smart-home industry, but Thread predates Matter by seven years, when the Thread Group was created in 2014. The group numbered seven companies to start, but has grown to 13 board members and over 130 contributors since Thread was first released to the public in 2015.
Hundreds of contributors have worked on the open-source protocol by writing code and reporting bugs, which was critical in helping Thread become a standard that smart-home companies would want to use, Jonathan Hui, VP of technology at Thread Group and principal software engineer at Google Nest, told Emerging Tech Brew.
“What we did with Open Thread was provide an opportunity for companies to get together and say, ‘Let’s all pool our resources and work together on building this technology so that we can all benefit from a robust conductivity foundation, and build that ecosystem around it.’ And you’re seeing the same thing with Matter,” Hui said.
Thread, at its technical essence, is a low-power mesh networking protocol that very literally threads smart-home devices together in a home. In practice, Thread helps IoT devices like door locks, smoke detectors, lights, and motion sensors connect with each other while making sure they do it quickly and without draining a lot of battery.
In theory, this can allow users to spend less time swapping out batteries, charging devices, checking compatibility, or using different controllers to manage different smart-home devices.
“What drove the creation of Thread was to provide a simple and easy-to-use protocol for how to connect devices wirelessly together to make it robust and reliable,” Sujata Neidig, VP of marketing at Thread Group and director of marketing at NXP Semiconductors, told Emerging Tech Brew.
Adam Wright, research manager for IDC’s smart-home and office devices program, told Emerging Tech Brew that the smart-home industry already has a sound level of interoperability, and that Matter and Thread might be more useful to vendors and developers than to consumers looking for interoperability.
“I’m skeptical of there being a balanced outcome. I think that there’s certainly an imbalance in terms of who benefits from having greater visibility into devices in the smart house,” Wright said.