Comment by Aardwolf
2 days ago
14 years is not long for things built into a home...
Imho there should be some kind of electrical standard of how these things are controlled (specified in voltages, relays, ... and not changing over the years nor between companies), and then have something that can be interchangeable that can be upgraded "with the times" to control all this.
Imho you're kinda describing how Zigbee and Z-wave work. The devices have various profiles like "Light bulb" or "button" or "temp sensor" and you can pair them with a Hub device. You could replace the hub with a new one, for instance, if say, Ethernet or TCP/IP became outdated. And new profiles are invented over time to allow new classes of devices.
Matter is a new standard that is incredibly slowly rolling out, the problem with it is that it isn't the 'full picture' because it only specifies a protocol but not the physical medium. So you can have matter devices over TCP/IP that have to be connected to Wi-Fi, or matter devices over Thread radio (more akin to Zigbee). Wi-Fi will come with its own set of headaches since you have to have some dumb app or whatever to use, to get the correct credentials onto each individual IoT device.
Thread is an IPv6 network stack. So if you're using Matter over Thread, you're using TCP/IP (or more specifically, UDP over IP).
TCP/IP and its associated network and transport protocols are not going to be outdated in our lifetimes.
Thanks for the correction. My main point was that Matter over a normal Ethernet network is imho a different animal than Matter over Thread.
Not that I've yet found any decent devices that don't cost a fortune that do anything with Thread, other than apparently a half dozen things I own are Thread Border Routers (hubs). I have all these hubs and nothing for them to speak to.
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Some of these items were sold much more recently than that! Also, I paid a few hundred bucks to have the light switches installed in my home, so the wasted cost is perhaps double what I paid Belkin for the switches.