right at the end of the year smart home enthusiasts got an early Christmas
present with a massive announcement from Apple Google and Amazon they're working
together on a single smart home standard called the project connected home over
IP or chip after reading the news this was my initial reaction but what is chip
and why is it such a big deal for the future of smart homes and why should you
even care I'm Matt Farrell welcome to undecided
If you've watched my channel with any regularity you know two things about me
I like to dig into the how and the why of technologies that can impact our
lives and two I'm a big fan of smart homes because they're far more than eye
candy and smart phone parlor tricks they can add secured accessibility and help
with energy conservation in any home but recommending smart home gadgets and
setups is tricky I've often referred to the current state of smart home
technology as being a bit of the Wild West every company is out for themselves
creating systems that often don't talk to a competitor system which means
consumers can often get left holding the bag it's why I'm very selective in the
gear that I recommend on this channel the number one requirement is that it's
easy to use and setup the second requirement is that it's safe and secure
and the third is that it's cross-platform as it possibly can be and
sometimes you have to make trade-offs on that last one to ensure the first two
well with the announcement of chip it's looking like there may be a light at the
end of the tunnel if it plays out like I hope it does we may have all three of
those items addressed going forward the wild west may finally be tamed today we
have several competing standards with protocols like ZigBee, thread, z-wave,
bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi, works with nest, apple homekit, x10, Lutron ... you get the idea each
of them have their pros and their cons start building out your smart home with
one of these technologies but you need to branch out to another you're going to
need to use some kind of bridge device or service and most often we're talking
about like smart things or habitat or services
like ifttt which is if this than that and like I said before it's the Wild
West this makes for a very challenging user experience chip is aiming to put
all of that behind us things like ZigBee thread Bluetooth
Wi-Fi aren't going anywhere but there'll be a standard smart home communications
protocol that operates amongst all of that so the devices can seamlessly talk
to each other in theory if you buy a chip certified device from one company
it'll be able to work with another chip certified device from a competitor for
instance a smart thermostat would have a standard way to communicate temperature
humidity and fan speed as well as to receive commands to adjust temperature
or turn the fan on or off nest ecobee or honeywell shouldn't matter as long as
they're all chip certified one of the most interesting things to me is that
the heart of the effort is coming from the ZigBee Alliance Apple Google and
Amazon those are some of the biggest players in smart homes today other
partners include IKEA Legrand smart things and silicon labs
the last one is even more interesting because Silicon Labs owns z-wave which
is one of the other major smart home wireless standards today z-wave in
theory is open sourced but Silicon Labs is the only company allowed to produce
the z-wave wireless chips needed to make it work it's not exactly open a couple
of days after the announcement of chip silicon labs announced that they were
opening up z-wave to allow competitors to manufacture z-wave chips that move
alone shows how massive chips impact on the industry may end up being Apple also
has open source aspects of home kits ADK which is an assessment deployment kit
which will make it easier for accessory makers to test out and experiment with
home kit without needing to pay upfront and to quote Apple from their blog post
about chip by open sourcing its home kit technology Apple will be helping to
jumpstart the initiative and ultimately deliver an even better experience to
customers starting today developers can use the home kit open source ADK to
prototype non-commercial smart home accessories Apple will also contribute
its home kit accessory protocol to the working group the siloed nature of
current smart home technology has been holding it back
I hear from a lot of people that they just don't get the appeal of smart home
technology advertisers tend to focus heavily on the hey look I can turn my
lights red by using my phone and that gives the perception that spark home
technology is just eye candy and doesn't provide real value others have been
burned by buying something that requires a specific app and setup to use and it
can't talk to anything else in their house nobody wants to have to jump
between a half-dozen different apps to configure things and the industry has
finally woken up to the user experience challenges and is attempting to fix it
they'll get a lot further working together instead of trying to maintain
such strict silos this is the first smart home standard I've actually gotten
excited about because of all the major players that are involved the system is
abstracting and unifying the underlying communications between the devices that
means companies like Apple Google Amazon can focus on creating engaging software
experiences on top of that communications layer devices will just
work and users will have a cohesive user experience using whatever software
platform they're happiest with whether that's Amazon Apple Google smart things
fill in your favorite platform here you know the gadget side of things
it should simplify development and manufacturing a company doesn't have to
design their own light bulb or smart thermostat to work specifically with
Alexa Google Amazon or even smart things and
they don't have to necessarily create their own app just to get things up and
running they can focus on creating well-built smart home products this in
theory should help to commoditize those products and drive down prices lowering
development costs will lower final product cost and in the end we should
hopefully see a wider variety of products in the market with a lower cost
and a far better user experience and set up and use but what's the downside I see
two possible issues first groups like this can get bogged down in corporate
politics and infighting can slow down agreement on a final standard so while
this sounds like it's a great concept on paper there's still a lot of details for
the group to iron out they're hoping to have a finalized chip specification out
by late 2020 which is great if they can stick to that timeline the world wide
web consortium took years to finalize HTML
five specification for websites it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison
but standards bodies aren't known for their speed
the second problem could be that it just adds to the mess of standards that are
already out there instead of one specification to rule them all
we just end up adding yet another this could manifest through half-hearted
adoption of the standard and since the standardization will commoditize many
smart home products like lights some manufacturers may want to hold back
certain features and functions for their proprietary systems of software
otherwise they could risk not standing out from the crowd and we've seen
similar issues and web standards and browsers browser makers want to iterate
and roll out new features that are part of the standard yet and developers start
creating websites targeted at those browsers with non-standard HTML and CSS
which makes other browsers not appear to be fully functional and you end up
seeing websites that say things like best viewed in Chrome well that happened
with this I hope not but will most likely see some non-standard
half-hearted implementations along the way those potential pitfalls are far
outweighed by the upside of this announcement the smart home industry has
needed a shake-up something to pull the major players together in order to take
Smart Homes truly mainstream it'll take a year or so for the standard to be
agreed upon in a few more years to see a lot of chips certified products hitting
the market but it's a start the timing of this announcement couldn't be better
Wi-Fi 6 is a major leap over Wi-Fi 5 which is what we're all using today and
one of the big reasons I tend not to recommend Wi-Fi smart home gear over
ZigBee or z-wave is that most Wi-Fi routers can't handle a lot of devices
connected at once most routers start to choke when they hit around 50 devices
which is pretty easy when you start adding in things like lightbulbs and
thermostats and door locks and even more to your home Wi-Fi 6 changes that by
being able to handle 4 times the number of devices requiring less power from
each device maintaining connection and it's also able to communicate with a
dozen devices at the same time chip and Wi-Fi 6 strikes me as the perfect
pairing it's the chocolate and peanut butter combo that could accelerate adopt
and improve the smart-home experience does that mean we should hold off on
buying gear until this stuff gets finalized no well there's still no
information on upgrade ability of current devices to the new standard
Apple Amazon and Google have all said they're not deprecating old devices
everything that works today will continue to work into the future the
chip announcement makes me even more bullish on smart home technology in
general I'm looking forward to the day when I have a smart TV charger that can
coordinate with my home's battery and solar panels to optimize my charging
schedule to save me money all without me having to do anything other than
plugging the car into the charger there are so many possibilities for how these
devices can coordinate to save us energy money and make us safer now are any of
you excited about the possibilities around this update jump into the
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