Thread, by Google’s Nest and 6 Other Companies, Offers a New Home Networking Protocol
Analysts at Gartner Inc. have predicted that “smart home” products will add $1.9 trillion to the global economy in the next six years. While that number may seem high in a market of fragmented product lines that don’t always “play nice,” it looked a lot more realistic with the announcement by Google’s Nest, and six other companies (Yale Security, Silicon Labs, Samsung Electronics, Freescale® Semiconductor, Big Ass Fans and ARM) that the companies have formed the Thread Group (www.threadgroup.org) to develop Thread, a new IP-based wireless networking protocol. The charter of the Thread Group is to guide the adoption of the Thread protocol, which will offer manufacturers and consumers “the very best way to connect and control products around the home.”
While currently available 802.15.4 networking technologies have their own advantages, each also has critical issues that prevent the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) from being realized, according to the Tread Group These include lack of interoperability, inability to carry IPv6 communications, high power requirements that drain batteries quickly, and “hub-and-spoke” models dependent on one device (if that device fails, the whole network goes down). With Thread, product developers and consumers can easily and securely connect more than 250 devices into a low-power, wireless mesh network that also includes direct Internet and cloud access for every device, according to the announcement by the Thread Group.