With year-end looming on the horizon, I always like to pause and reflect on the good work and many milestones we together achieve as the Thread Group. It was another year of virtual meetings, which on one hand was disappointing and more of the same, but on the other challenged us to get creative and discover different ways to collaborate and motivate!
Thread Momentum
A look back over the past 12 months shows a steady pattern of milestones and industry support for our IP-based networking transport layer that’s designed to connect low-power products in homes and buildings. This includes hitting the 100 certified products mark!
Built on Thread certified end products introduced by Belkin, Eve Systems and Nanoleaf, contributed to this growth. Each company offers a range of smart home products which are now enabled by HomeKit with Thread and its availability in the Apple HomePod mini and AppleTV. The market’s response to these new products highlights the benefits that Thread as a network layer provides – fast response time, robust networks, secure operation and a shared mesh that removes the need for dedicated and proprietary hubs. (Peruse our case studies to read more about the innovative companies that are incorporating Thread into their products and portfolios to further grow the world’s ever-expanding collection of IoT products.)
Because Thread is agnostic to the application layer, it gives manufacturers the flexibility to choose one (or multiple) app layers for their intended use case. Thread Group has partnered with other industry IoT standards organizations to deliver complete network solutions.
In the smart home market, there’s been tremendous progress and interest in Matter, a new smart home connectivity standard being developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) and backed by well-known brands including Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung SmartThings, and many other companies. Matter unifies the best of the smart home technologies into a single application framework standard with IP as the backbone. Companies who are both Thread Group and CSA members are developing Matter with Thread implementations – some of which are on display today in the Matter public GitHub with others expected to be spotlighted at the Consumer Electronics Show in early Jan 2022.
In the commercial buildings market, our technology provides improved end-to-end security and integrates seamlessly into the existing IP networks in buildings. One of the partnerships announced this year is with the DALI Alliance (DiiA) – the global industry organization for DALI lighting control, which adopted Thread as the first network technology that will be available with DALI+ with Thread.
Thread’s Growing Ecosystem
Thread Group continues to grow as an organization with members committed to adopting and progressing our flagship protocol. Amazon and Samsung SmartThings both joined the Board of Directors, bringing extraordinary expertise tailored for Smart Home platforms. And, overall membership increased by nearly 20% bringing new perspectives and use cases from a range of markets and regions. We are also very excited and grateful for the opportunity to grow our diverse ecosystem with the addition of new members from the China market, product/component manufacturers, and academia realms.
Expanded Functionalities on the Horizon
Thread Group members have been hard at work advancing Thread. First of all, the Thread 1.2 certification program is on track to be released in January. Thread 1.2 adds features designed to improve the scalability of Thread networks, by making them more responsive and capable of a higher network density, and to optimize low power performance. The Thread 1.2 White Paper provides more details on these features.
Another key effort has been standardizing the Border Router function, to make it simple for Thread devices to be discovered and communicate with those outside the Thread network. Like Wi-Fi access points, Thread Border Routers provide functionality such as routing traffic and connecting to the cloud, but are unique as they can be built into existing devices from any company – minimizing the need for additional dedicated hardware. This enhancement will be included in a new version of the Thread specification that will be backward compatible with the existing spec, and is planned to launch in Q1 2022. More details to unfold in the new year, including specifics about our certification program.
Wishing You Comfort & Joy
As we put the finishing touches on 2021, I want to express how incredibly grateful I am to steadily work alongside our Thread Group members. The passion, expertise and commitment from these individuals is unwavering, and paired with the collaboration from their organizations and liaison partners we are certainly a force in the IoT industry. Wishing everyone a happy, healthy holiday season as we usher in a promising new year.
