In This Corner…
Ernest Worthman, Editorial Director
I’m a fan of competition — make no mistake about it. Theoretically, competition is supposed to make things better and cheaper, among other things. Most of the time it does work that way — but not necessarily always.
So, I’ve been keeping an ear to the rail with ZigBee, wondering how long it would take before we saw competition start to show up. Well, it has.
Up until now, in one corner we have the ZigBee Alliance. In the other corner there is a collection of proprietary technologies, none of which were much of a threat.
However, of late, we have seen the emergence of the Z-Wave Alliance. This alliance is a group of 60 companies that will be licensees of Zensys’s Z-Wave technology in a number of products. Zensys intends to license Z-Wave to the Alliance to create both competition to ZigBee and multiple sources for the technology in the industry. This is supposed to turn Z-Wave into an open standard.
Well, this has my red flags waving. At least ZigBee is developing to a IEEE standard (IEEE 802.15.4). Z-Wave, however, is coming from a totally proprietary source. And while standards bodies such as the IEEE, TIA, ITU and countless others are generally bogged by politics and industry nepotism, it’s the best there is for guaranteeing some semblance of interoperability.
Even though big names in the Z-Wave Alliance include Leviton, Sylvania, and Motorola, and Zensys is making Z-Wave compatible with Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), I still have reservations. I don’t see any reference to any accepted open standards body.
Well OK. This is what I’ve learned so far.
Z-Wave's intent is to focus on the residential side, while ZigBee is being pushed more primarily in industrial and large commercial environments (of course, this is likely to change as the technologies emerge — remember Bluetooth)?
Promotions say Z-Wave products are out now from 100 OEMs. There are over 40 products out now running Z-Wave, with another hundred due to appear by the end of the 1st quarter of this year (it is April isn’t it?). You’d think I see Z-Wave products at my local Worst Buys, Short-Circuit Cities or hardware mega-stores, but so far nothing. At the recent CES, there were a few Z-Wave-based products, but only a few. And what’s at the CES isn’t usually on the store’s shelves for a while and so far, nothing that smacks of over a hundred products on store shelves by next month.
There seems to be a significant interest in the emerging mesh network technology, on which Z-Wave (and others) are based. Mesh technology, among other things, enables consumers to monitor and manage their lighting, security systems, thermostats, garage door openers, entertainment systems meter reading, access control, intruder and fire detection, etc. (mesh is also being used in wireless communications, but there just isn’t enough room in this column to include it).
Supposedly, Z-Wave delivers high quality networking at a fraction of the cost of other similar technologies by focusing on narrow bandwidth applications and substituting costly hardware with innovative software solutions. And remember, they say it will be an open standard. Hmmm...we’ll see.
Well, I gotta tell ya...I have a pretty prolific X10 wireless/power line carrier (PLC) system in my house. Quite frankly, its performance is dismal. My house sitter tells me my kitchen is haunted because the kitchen light goes on and off at random. And, even though I’ve programmed my outdoor motion sensors to work only at night, I often see them come on when I walk in or out of my back door during the day (and randomly as well ). I also have X10 wireless remote wall switches that queue lamp and appliance modules. Pretty regularly these devices loose their module assignment and I have to reprogram them.
I also can’t get all of my units to function on the same house code. Some just don’t respond to their unit code unless I have them on a different house code and have a second transceiver. And X10 tech support is dismal as well. They only know two things: "it’s a phase problem" or "it’s an interference problem. "
My X10 wireless security camera system is just as lousy. I have four wireless/PLC cameras. They often get confused and cross signals. My garage cam shows my back yard, the front porch camera shows the alley. I’m offering a lottery as to which camera will pick up which station at any given time.
Well, enough ragging on X10 and I’m running out of room so I better get to the point.
The point is that neither ZigBee or Z-Wave are out, commercially, in force. And the systems that are out, suck. My concern is that the competition between the two, before they are even out of the gate, is going to start a downward price/feature spiral. So conceivably, rather than next generation consumer C2 systems, we might just get another technologically- and performance-challenged wireless technology, similar to today cellular telephone technology.
Wireless Design & Development
Advantage Business Media
Rockaway, NJ, 07866
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