Comment by xp84
2 days ago
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 You could replace the hub with a new one, for instance, if say, Ethernet or TCP/IP became outdated.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TCP/IP and its associated network and transport protocols are not going to be outdated in our lifetimes.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.
Matter over ethernet, as designed, should work exactly like matter over wifi and matter over thread. The only exception is the Bluetooth LE pairing component, the rest is a mix of IPv6, mDNS, and other pretty much standard protocols for networking and discovery.
Matter and Thread seem to be progressing rather slowly when it comes to hardware support. Zigbee seems to be the reigning champion still, though slowly companies seem to be moving towards Matter now.
The super cheap AliExpress stuff will probably take years to move on. Matter is a western standard backed by western big tech, so unless you're mostly targeting the west you may as well stick to Zigbee for a while.
The biggest advantage to Thread over Zigbee is probably that phones have Thread radios (iPhones and some Androids) so you can directly control light bulbs and such without any gateways or firewalls to care about. Now that esp32s are also gaining Thread support, things should start accelerating in a few product cycles.
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