Randall Munroe’s classicxkcd“Standards”Comic is cited all the time for a reason: it perfectly describes the feeling everybody has when a new standard is proposed. I saw it flying around Twitter a bunch yesterday in the wake of the announcement that Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, Zigbee, and a host of others have joined up tocreate a new smart home standard that would be open source and based on IP(an internet protocol address, not intellectual property).
The idea behind the the standard is to make it easier to get new smart home devices onboarded on to your network and to minimize the need for consumers to have to check to see what is or isn’t compatible with their smart home control system – whether that be Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, or something more professional like Control4.
Think of it this way: the smart home has a plumbing problem. Imagine none of the companies making faucets or even pipes were willing to talk to each other, so every single connector was different, depending on the company. And none of them even agree on how to route hot, cold, and sewage water. Just to fix your sink you have to commit to working with a single company in perpetuity and probably make five trips to the hardware store for adapters if you didn’t.
That’s what’s happening right now when you screw in a smart lightbulb or wire up a smart thermostat. Some of that pain is made invisible by software abstraction from Amazon or Google, but it’s still a snarled mess underneath.
So: standardize the pipes. It is not a new idea – at all! Basically, if there are too many standards,of coursetechnologists will think the solution is to make a new one to unify them andof coursethat new one will not actually do that and then there will be yet more standards. Will this time be any different?
Right now, signs point to “yes and no,” which is very unsatisfying but also very likely true. Don’t walk away muttering the word from the last panel of Munroe’s comic, though. Because this so-calledProject Connected Home over IP industry working groupnot only has a very catchy name, it is also one of the Most interesting developments in the smart home since Alexa.
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******** Randall Munroe, xkcd Before I get into what the Connected Home over IP industry working group (CHOIP? Probably CHIP but CHOIP is funnier.) Is trying tomake, I think we need to take a minute thinking over what itis. It’s rare to see all these companies in the same headline, and it’s even rarer to see that headline be something they agreed on instead of something they’re being investigated over.
If nothing else, this working group is worth paying attention to because it has a better than average chance (for proposed open source standards, anyway) of succeeding. That’s not often the case in the smart home space. In fact, it’s usually not.
For example, earlier this year Amazon put together a similar industry groupdesigned to ensure voice assistants could interoperate with each other – so that voice assistants could coexist on the same speaker at the same time. Over 2014 companies signed up. Google, Apple, and Samsung did not.
– Dieter Bohn (@backlon) (December) ************************************************************************************************************************************************************,
(*************************************** But now, we have all these companies actually agreeing to work with each other. Charlie Kindel, chief product & technology officer atSnapAV(and formerly on the Alexa team at Amazon) says “the fact that it includes Amazon, Apple, and Google is a pretty significant statement … To get them together to talk at this level – which we’ve never had success in doing before – is a great start. ” A great start , but certainly not a complete solution – nor does it purport to be. Thebare-bones website that was rushed up for the working groupsays that right now the goal is to “release a draft specification and a preliminary reference open source implementation in late (****************************************************************************************************************************************. Which means that actual implementation of the standard in consumer products is surely even further out. (Think) months for real consumer products in the most optimistic scenario. Anybody who’s watched gigantic companies try to work together to agree on standards for web browsers can attest to the fact that these things take time. So what exactly is this working group planning to propose? What is the thing they’re actually making and why does it matter? That, as with all things in the smart home, is complicated. The group wants to create a better low-level networking system for devices in the smart home. Right now, there’s a confusing mix of different kinds of radios (Wi-Fi,**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************. 4, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, Z-Wave, the list goes on) and each tends to handle its networking in a different way. The internet and nearly all other networks you use, by comparison, are IP-based: each device has its own address and communicates via common, agreed-upon methods. So at its base, this is an agreement in principle that the smart home needs that same basic level of common plumbing. In many ways, it sounds quite a lot like the Thread and Weave systems that Google has completely failed to get any traction for – and in fact
Google’s blog post says explicitlythat it will be contributing those standards to the project.
Kindel jokes that “the good thing about standards is there so many to choose from” and that this this proposed standard “really is the poster child” for that idea. He notes that other smart home technologies like Z-Wave or even Amazon’s proposed Sidewalk system won’t be obviated by this, in part because they support longer ranges.
This has all been a surface skim of a very technical area – if there’s a takeaway for you it’s that these companies recognize that it’s still too difficult to know if a device will work with your setup and way too difficult to actually do that initial setup. In theory, this new proposal could help with that.
If you’ve tracked the various competing technologies that gadgets have used to communicate over the years, you’d know it’s always been a mess.
Here’s a story my colleague Jake Kastrenakes wrote over five years ago decrying the dumb state of the smart home
So in some ways, the problem the group is trying to solve already feels, well,solvedfor many consumers. Most people don’t need to bother knowing about Zigbee or smart home bridges to set up their light bulbs – their smart assistants handle that for them.
Developers, however, are forced to make sure their product supports three or more different smart home software ecosystems. That’s a lot of work. And it inevitably means some will get left behind, or busted, or worst of all: hacked.
To be clear, even in a perfect scenario this new system won’t mean a beautiful, interoperable world. The very layers of software abstraction that helped simplify the smart home are going to continue to exist and compete with each other. It just seems like Apple, Amazon, and Google would rather compete head-to-head than try to dragoon third-party smart home devices makers to their various sides in some kind of Risk-esque war of attrition.
Plus, not for nothing, an agreed-upon solution for this level of smart home plumbing would mean that these companies could use the resources they have dedicated to that towards building other stuff.
Kindel believes that lots of consumers are still going to need professionals and an OS that helps make different ecosystems work together – like those at his company Control4 (which recentlymerged with SnapAV). “We do believe that for it to really be refined, normal human beings aren’t going to want to do it themselves. They’re going to hire local professionals, just like they don’t do their own plumbing or even paint their own rooms. ”
Maybe. One thing’s for sure, there are too many standards. Surely one more can’t make it worse?
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This affects all companies, but in this moment it’s especially pertinent to Google. Organizers there were quite open about using Google-provided tools like Docs to coordinate.
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(**************************************Also. I am calling this “Connected Home Over IP Industry Working Group” thing ** CHOIP ** and nobody can stop me.**************************** CHOIP. You did this to yourselves, Apple Amazon Google Samsung Zigbee. You’re all CHOIPers. You made your CHOIP.– Dieter Bohn (@backlon) (December) ************************************************************************************************************************************************************,
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