Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I have tons of devices and I wish everything was Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi has its problems but at least it is easily measurable, debugable, ... Zigbee is a voodoo protocol: you initiate the pairing and hope for the best. And then you hope for the best to have it stay on.
- I'm running both now, and while my Matter network seems to be solid, I can't get over the fact that it's so much harder to set up devices than on Zigbee. Why does Google need to get involved for me to set up a local IKEA device with my local border router?by timvdalen
- As someone with hundreds of Zigbee devices w/ zigbee2mqtt in a network (actually 2; one in my standalone garage, and one in the house), I'm hoping Thread/Matter will not take over because _for me_ it does not have a single improvement over Zigbee 3.0 and I have had 0 inclination to adopt any Matter devices so far. Probably why Zigbee 4.0 is a thing.by moogly
- These protocols add so much complications it makes wifi/tcp/ip a blaze
They fix some problems but add more, you endup just like that xckd about protocols
by vdfs - Some specifics would be a great addition to this comment.by deadmutex
- I studied zigbee protocol for an exam and while everything is there for a reason, it truly feels diabolicalby amarcheschi
- Thats exactly what Matter over Thread solves. It just uses standard ipv6, udp, tcp.
WiFi is not designed for lots of low energy devices that can be repeaters.
by preisschild - A bit of clarification: Thread is a layer 2 protocol, for the user, it looks like standard IPv6. Matter is application level, and just expect standard TCP/IP underneath. There's nothing binding Matter to Thread, and in fact a lot of Matter devices use Wifiby torginus
- Having switched to zigbee devices recently I regret trying to start with WiFi. While I'm not sure how it looks under the hood, adding devices with home assistant was miles easier.by Forge36
- I’m a bit surprised they didn’t add zwave into this comparison.by SEJeff
- Doesn't zwave use a different frequency, and zigbee and thread are both 2.4ghz? Perhaps that makes it a more fair comparison?by asveikau
- I'd like to use z-wave but as an Australian we have different allowed frequency bands (specifically the USA-market gear uses frequencies that are reserved for telecom use over here, and anything that can interfere with the ability to call emergency services is Very Illegal), and thus the few devices that get built supporting the AU rf bands are overly expensive due to the (lack of) economy of scale.
As a result my home automation stack is a mix of zigbee, Matter (over both Wifi and Thread), and just plain WiFi. All of which uses the 2.4Ghz (and 5Ghz but mostly 2.4 for the IoT stuff) ISM band(s) and is thus cheap and plentiful.
Not sure how many other regions suffer the same issues, but I suspect that z-wave will be outcompeted by the more modern alternatives in the coming years.
/rant
by waste_monk - yes, and also that if someone is buying stuff new, it should be exclusively zwave800 stuff. example hardware on the "hub" end would be:
https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zwa-2/
https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zst39-z-wave-long-range-usb-sti...
the zooz is this internally: https://www.silabs.com/wireless/z-wave/800-series-modem-soc/...
by walrus01 - They're probably only comparing open protocols. If one doesn't care if their protocol is proprietary then sure one might consider zwave. But it's hardly "surprising" that it's left out.
- `establishing it as a more robust foundation for larger and more heterogeneous deployments.`
Based on.... 6 devices?
Quite honestly I would have been interested in measurements with more than only 6 devices. Maybe upto 50 or so,even better if they'd mixed different hardware nodes for a more realistic scenario
by XiS - Absolutely. My setup which is about 1 month old already has 14 devices and I'm just getting started. Only having 6 devices really feels comically small for a study investigating the performance of communication protocols where device count can really make a differnce, as observed by even then changes from 1 to 6 devices.by 8-prime
- I have 47 thread/matter devices, alongside some 10-15 matter over wifi devices, so not quite 50, but "close enough".
It's not as fast as Zigbee, not in day to day usage, and not in terms of reconnecting, which often takes 30 seconds (ie. after a power outage) where my Zigbee devices just seem to reconnect instantly. On day to day usage there's a slight delay when turning something on, but it's maybe 100ms or less.
I initially had quite a few problems, but after "standardizing" on a single thread network (I had 3 before for some reason), as well as adding some wired thread border routers, things have become much more stable.
My zigbee to thread is still a "work in progress", replacing devices as they fail (ie. lightbulbs), and I'm also still adding new Zigbee devices like the Aqara T1 Valve controller, but I prefer thread over zigbee today.
One thing I will note, people tend to underestimate the range of thread (and zigbee for that matter). Each mains powered device will function as a repeater just like zigbee, and I initially thought I might need a couple of smart plugs as repeaters, but despite having a somewhat large house (by european standards) as well as double brick walls dividing it, my thread devices have no problems "seeing" a thread border router in the opposite end of the house.
by 8fingerlouie - A lot of graphs where OpenThread & zigbee dance around each other, are within 2x of each other.
Two huge notables to me: message throughput for openthreads scales up, zigbee seems to hit a wall early. Not sure when that matters but very clear. The last table was a fright through: it takes half a minute for OpenThreads to recover after a node drops where-as Zigbee a quarter second! Wow.
- Is there a situation in which your smarthome taking 30s to recover from a node failure is impacting your life? Seems like a distinction without a differenceby richwater
- I’m in the process of migrating from Zigbee (Z2M) to Matter over Thread (Apple HomePods + Matter Server).
My Zigbee network was a mishmash of different vendors all of which had their own failure rates and quirks, Aqara having by far the highest failure rate and complexity.
My new Ikea (Thread) based setup has had absolutely zero issues so far and fingers crossed it doesn’t start suffering as I scale it out. That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.
by cpressland - > That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.
I’m taking your “but” to mean “it is acceptable.
I would at least deem it noticeable to wait a quarter second for my light to turn on. May just be my own impatience, but I get an insta-headache whenever I have to wait to find out whether something worked or I have to try again. Every bit of jank is a downgrade in quality of life to me.
Now: May this be due to that specific setup or is the delay somehow inherent to the technology?
by solarkraft - What's to stop Ikea from pushing an OTA and crippling your whole setup 2 years from now?by tetris11