We at Thread Group see today’s introduction of Project Connected Home over IP via joint announcement from Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance - along with the support and contribution of Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian- as an exciting milestone to accelerate IoT market adoption.

The Challenge:

There are numerous technologies for wireless connectivity at all layers of the network stack and to-date, major platform providers, including Amazon, Apple and Google, have implemented different approaches.

While this allows flexibility, and potential competitive advantage for individual companies, for the industry as a whole it's highly problematic. Fragmentation and incompatible technologies challenge and frustrate all involved. Specifically:

Product manufacturers + developers must:

• Incur substantial costs and overhead as they are forced to pick and choose which platforms they wish to work with
• Support multiple SKUs (stock keeping units), one for each platform and technology with which they want to interoperate
• Risk obsolescence of protocols, which creates support burdens and issues over the lifetime of product

Meanwhile, consumers struggle with:

• Confusion and frustration on what choice to make when purchasing smart home products
• Inconsistent performance and interoperability
• General disappointment and disillusionment

What is Project Connected Home over IP?
At its core, the Project is an unprecedented commitment across the smart home-focused IoT ecosystem to formally collaborate and create a universal application layer protocol.

This new app layer (name TBD) will be built on market-proven IP-based smart home technologies, and will bring the following benefits to both developers and consumers:

• A unified and standardized baseline product out-of-box experience.
• Platform- and ecosystem-agnostic technology: any device, any ecosystem.
• Reduction of burdensome and costly one-off gateways and translators by building upon Internet Protocol (IPv6) for direct yet scalable communication.
• End-to-end data security and privacy among in-home devices, mobiles, and cloud services.
• A widely-adopted helpful home application standard for a variety of network and connectivity technologies, including Wi-Fi (internet connectivity), Thread (low-power mesh) and Bluetooth Low Energy (setup and other mobile interactions)–essential yet complementary networking and connectivity technologies for the connected home.
• A singular programming model for devices, mobile, and cloud.
• A unified data model for the rest of industry to adopt and use.

More information about the “Project Connected Home over IP” can be found at connectedhomeip.com.

Thread + Project Connected Home over IP
From the beginning, Thread provided an IP-based networking layer, creating a reliable, secure and scalable mesh network to connect low-power products in homes and buildings. Thread has always been -- and continues to be -- agnostic to the application layer. This gives product manufacturers the flexibility to choose one (or multiple) app layers for their use case. They can also maintain current platforms and ecosystems while exploring Thread-enabled benefits, without disrupting device performance.

We’re excited to see a cross-industry initiative underway to unify app layers into a single protocol that runs over IP networks (like Thread) for the smart home.

We have seen and heard demand in the marketplace to bring about increased convergence and interoperability to manufacturers and consumers alike. In order for IoT to deliver on its promise, the industry must eliminate friction and frustration, and lower costs and overhead.

The Thread Group sees network technologies that support IP as the foundation for this convergence. We’re confident, because we’ve seen IP-based success in several wireless network application scenarios. Notably WiFi -- for devices requiring higher power, high-bandwidth network applications -- as well as emerging technologies such as Thread, which addresses low-powered, low-bandwidth, and cost-sensitive applications.

When product manufacturers and developers use Thread and this new unified app layer protocol, they will see a marked reduction of their development and carrying costs, because they’ll only need to create a single SKU.

For consumers, confusion and frustration will evaporate because, “things will just work.”

In Summary
Thread’s value as a low-power, secure and IP-based mesh networking layer is reaffirmed with this new initiative in the smart home market. Since Thread is already deployed and Project Connected Home over IP is being built from existing and market-proven technologies, we envision the Project Connected Home over IP collaboration to move quickly and drive an acceleration in the expansion of the smart home market.