back to article The Internet of Things becomes the Game of Thrones in standards war

There is an "internet of things" standards war coming and Z-Wave will emerge triumphant, at least according to two of its leading advocates. Despite a number of high-profile setbacks in recent weeks, interim chair of the Z-Wave Alliance Raoul Wijgergangs and Alliance Board member Avi Rosenthal are (as you'd expect) confident …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IOT = Internet of ...

    ... Tulips?

    ... Turds?

    ... Thrauds?

    1. Trigonoceps occipitalis

      Re: IOT = Internet of ...

      Trash

      noun

      = nonsense, rubbish, garbage (informal), rot, balls (taboo & slang), bull (slang), shit (taboo & slang), pants (slang), crap (slang), bullshit (taboo & slang), hot air (informal), tosh (slang, mainly British), pap, cobblers (British, taboo & slang), bilge (informal), drivel, twaddle, tripe (informal), guff (slang), moonshine, hogwash, malarkey, hokum (slang, mainly US & Canadian), piffle (informal), poppycock (informal), inanity, balderdash, bosh (informal), eyewash (informal), kak (South Africa, taboo & slang), trumpery, tommyrot, foolish talk, horsefeathers (US, slang), bunkum or buncombe (mainly US), bizzo (Australian, slang), bull's wool (Australian & New Zealand, slang)

  2. frank ly

    IoT as GoT

    Will there be any controversial sex scenes?

    "Wijgergangs also highlights another advantage of the Z-Wave spec - by using the 900MHz frequency, rather than ZigBee's (and WiFi's and Thread's) 2.5GHz frequency, the spectrum is less cluttered. And that can translate to significantly less power usage as it reduces the number of retries needed to send data."

    So, if every (future) device uses Z-Wave, there's your messy orgy right there.

  3. MJI Silver badge

    Format wars, crap often wins.

    I hate it when the crap wins, Z-Wave have just stated their product is crap, whenever you compare yourself to Vhs you are stating that fact.

    Blu Ray win was not a quality war but a capacity battle. But DAT became a back up format.

    But a lot of us remember the Vhs Beta war of the 1980s, I still cannot understand how Vhs won when it was obviously worse.

    My Sanyo HiFi deck was clunky but the picture and sound was excellent, my £800 Sony deck was the best 1/2" home deck I had ever played with and my old Sony portable is still in use for video capture.

    I did find on editing that a 3rd gen Beta recording looked better than a Vhs 2nd gen recording. If you like my final copy looks better than the Vhs edit master.

    A lot of these old tapes still look good when captured and burnt to DVD

  4. DropBear
    Unhappy

    When I last looked at Z-wave (which I did and still do favour over Zigbee & co.), they didn't have any easily accessible specs or any easily obtainable ready-made modules. That kinda was the end of it right there; not everyone is Siemens to be able to just waltz in through bespoke RF layout design, projected quantities, fees, NDAs and whatnot.

  5. Gavin Chester
    Meh

    Lets leave it a few years...

    "On one level, Z-Wave is at a major disadvantage: it is not an open protocol in that Sigma Designs owns the intellectual property and it manufacturers the chips and licenses the right to use it (there is currently only one other licensed Z-Wave chip manufacturer).

    Like the other big, proprietary standard in the IoT world Z-Wave allows others to develop products with its standards but that comes with a cost and with tight rules"

    And I suspect that's it in a nutshell, History is repeating itself, and I'm not sure Z-wave are really considering all the VHS/Beta issues.

    There may be a load of reasons Beta went under but its generally considered down to a few key reasons,

    - JVC licensed VHS to anyone who wanted to make VHS systems, whereas Sony only licensed Beta to select partners who met Sony's terms.

    - JVC 's willing to licence to almost anyone helped competition and so reduce costs.

    - Sony's Engineers concentrated on quality, JVC's practicality, the first Beta systems tapes could record an hour, VHS was two. Very few movies are 60 minutes or less so Beta suffered.

    - Once you get critical mass then market decides, once Beta machine sales started declining so video library's stopped stocking the films which perpetuated the downward spiral.

    So what will happen here, Exactly the same.

    Most of us don't care what protocol we use at home, as long as it works. Purchases will often to be driven by cost and practicality. I'd like some Hue lights, but honestly I'm not bothered they are Hue branded or the fact they use ZigBee. I want a set of lights that's easy to use (I have enough IT issues at work) and change colour in response to something.

    Hue and ZigBee is already selling in the numbers , its working and looks simple enough for everyone to use. Phillips have invested time to make it simple to use, and promoted it to get tools like IFTTT to support it. Hue may not be perfect but I suspect that's got a foot in the for the ZigBee camp to build on.

    Lets face it one of the biggest things that us consumers learned from the VHS/Beta format wars (or DAT/DCC.MD, or BluRay/HD-DVD, or all the memory card formats, ) is that we just leave them to fight it out before shelling out. No-one wants to be left with the V2000.

    1. strum

      Re: Lets leave it a few years...

      Not really pertinent to the article, perhaps - but I do find it tiresome that this Business School misunderstanding of the Betamax/VHS 'war' is continually repeated.

      As Gavin says - it didn't really happen that way.

      Not least because the myth fails to mention the early leader in video play/record - Philips, who had developed the licensing model for audiocassettes, and intended to do the same for videocassettes, if it wasn't for the minor detail that their own factories were pants. They could hardly license a process they couldn't master themselves.

  6. talk_is_cheap

    This is last year's war.

    All the current standards are designed to cope with the limitations of the CPUs and memory available at the time the standards were first put together so they all have profiles/sub-sets to keep processing power and memory requirements down.

    These limits are being removed as new SOCs provide better CPU core/s, RAM and storage, so it becomes easier to deploy more capable control software that will be able to support things like TCP/IP stacks.

    The results could be that all the current standards become little more that low power/low speed alternatives to the standard WiFi options.

    As for Z-Wave its a nice 'standard' but you spend all your time trying to match devices to the different controller solutions as not all profiles/devices types are supported by all controllers. There are also very few easy to use programming libraries to allow you to just do your own thing due to its licensing structure and the fact that everyone is selling devices rather than tools.

  7. FatherSane

    I wrote a Z-Wave stack a few years back as part of a proof-of-concept IoT project. I reversed engineered it from a combination of other people's FOS efforts and traffic sniffing and couple of device I bought off the shelf.

    The protocol is a whole heap of crap but more significantly there was no encryption, no client validation, in fact no security whatsoever. Sounds ideal for IoT.

  8. MrXavia
    Facepalm

    Z-Wave?? NOOOO

    Z-Wave is useless if you have a big house, unless your willing to stick every wall socket with a zwave device to repeat, and then you have zero chance of anything working during a power cut! Z-Wave Fire alarm? great... Fire is electrical.. oh poo your alarms no longer talk to each other...

    Wi-Fi is the way forward, pretty much everyone has a wifi-router, everyone takes care to ensure the whole house is covered..... battery back up on most peoples single wifi-router would also solve the issue of power outages for critical devices, such as fire alarms.. and since your phone also needs the wifi to receive the alert, you need the wifi battery back up anyway!

    with things like the ESP8266 chips being dirt cheap and low energy, I can't see the point in the other standards that all have failings!

    Rant over...

  9. Neil 44

    Having worked with both Zigbee and Z-Wave in real houses, I'd choose Z-Wave every time!

    868MHz (which is what UK Z-Wave uses) goes through walls MUCH better than 2.4GHz Zigbee, With Zigbee you need mains-powered repeaters which all adds to the complexity and cost of an install (yes, Z-Wave can have repeaters, but I've never had to use one)

    Getting Zigbee units from different manufacturers to talk to each other can be a nightmare: yes, there are standards for applications, but there are so many that finding a common one is tough - and that's before arriving at an ideal product that uses the Zigbee protocol layers, but puts a completely proprietary application layer on top...

    Horses for courses...

    (Never used IP6-LOPAN which is supposed to be Zigbee like, but marries to WiFi / internet better...)

    1. MrXavia
      Facepalm

      I tried to install a simple z-wave smoke alarm & hub to notify me in the event of fire, the battery powered z-wave smoke alarms could barely reach 10m open air, no way could it get through the walls...

      Would be interested to know what z-wave hardware you used that works through walls?

      I tried the Fibaro stuff, their answer was to install mains powered devices that would act as a repeater, great idea for smoke alarms..

    2. Probie

      I used Z-Wave - never again. It did NOT go through walls well, it did NOT make an ideal Mesh topology.

      In fact Z-Wave left a nasty taste in the mouth. Oh and for power consumption FFS do not get me started, way below manufactures specs. It was about as inter-operable as a horses' dick. At the time there were not a lot of Zigbee devices around, so I chose not use that, but I would have likely had the same issues.

      Next time I automate a home, its a drill, chisel some wire and an open source controller, it seems the only reliable path. Probably X11 or KNX. Get the job done right.

  10. Mark #255
    Facepalm

    VHS/Betamax zombie canard

    Betamax, though offering better quality than VHS, did this at the expense of shorter running time.

    So you couldn't (at launch, later iterations increased the running length) fit an entire film onto a single cassette.

    Intermission anyone?

  11. Bob C McKenzie

    There's away to go on this

    I agree with the sentiments of Gavin Chester. All successful technologies are 'open' which means clearly specified, with a specification that is available for at most an 'admin' fee and that doesn't require any ongoing royalty or licence costs.

    It sound like Z-Wave fails to meet any of these criteria. Bluetooth is already a hugely successful standard and will continue to evolve. Zigbee is not very successful so far, but it does seem to command some interest.

    Then there are new radio standards that deal with the very physical concerns of low-power and long range, plus the exceptionally important consideration of low cost (when scaled). I know that 'Weightless' achieve's this and I'm sure there are other burgeoning protocols, but judging by the thought put into and followers of 'weightless', if the members execute well it should succeed.

    Time, as ever, will tell.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Race to the Bottom

    Lets Just hope that in the race to gain market share and win the standards war.

    That the really important (but over looked by Joe Public consumer) issue of SECURITY is not brushed under the carpet and ignored.

    It needs to be the base and foundation of the standards.

    Also hoping that manufacturers of devices that do not move in their life are also fitted with Network ports. WIFI or which other wireless standard is all well and good but in new homes why cant the fridge, washing machine, freezer, TV, ETC, ETC be connected to a lan port or worst case a powerline adaptor.

    Im waiting sitting on the fence until its all sorted out and SECURITY is proved. and all devices will be connected to MY home hub NOT some companies cloud.

  13. Bob C McKenzie

    To find out more about 'weightless'

    For those of you wanting to know more about meeting the needs of IoT, please look at

    http://www.weightless.org/news/new-open-standard-weightlessn-for-iot-connectivity-goes-live

  14. earl grey
    Flame

    VHS/Betamax; DAT/cassette tapes; and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray

    VHS - better selection of pron.

    DAT - murdered in the crib by the recording industry. Hoisted by their own by releasing CDs.

    Blu-Ray - Sony managed to buy their way into a premier position.

  15. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Time to wait!

    This:

    Quoting Gavin Chester a few posts up: "Lets face it one of the biggest things that us consumers learned from the VHS/Beta format wars (or DAT/DCC.MD, or BluRay/HD-DVD, or all the memory card formats, ) is that we just leave them to fight it out before shelling out. No-one wants to be left with the V2000."

    Agreed (except that I'm a customer, not a consumer.) I was thinking if you were just getting something self-contained like those mood lights it might be OK; but even then, who wants to go to replace a bulb a few years down the road, only to find out that the old bulbs were on the losing side of the protocol war and the new bulbs don't use the same protocol? Definitely wait it out, who wants to spend the big bucks only to end up with Beta or HD-DVD? Prices may be more reasonable by then too.

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