What Smart Home Automation and Interoperability Mean for Today’s World

Smart home technology isn’t particularly new: believe it or not, it’s actually been around since the 1970s. The more modern incarnation of smart home automation, the stuff that developed into what we see around us today, started around 2004 with the ZigBee Alliance and 2005’s Z-Wave standard.

We’ve hardly touched the topic, and we’ve already hinted at the biggest problem plaguing smart home automation to this day: interoperability.

Back in those early days, there were ZigBee-compatible devices and Z-Wave-compatible devices. Getting devices on one protocol to talk to devices on the other was difficult, sometimes impossible.

It’s been nearly 20 years, so you’d hope we would’ve solved this by now, right?

Far from it.

Fast-forward to today, and you’ve got dozens of smart home brands flooding the market. In smart lighting, there’s Philips and Belkin and Wyze and Nanoleaf, and a dozen more.

Nest, Ecobee, and Honeywell are just three companies offering smart thermostats. Smart doorbells and security cameras and vacuums and even pressure cookers: it just goes on and on.

Not only that, all these brands have their own mix of compatibility. Many brands offer their own systems and platforms and most devices boast compatibility with one or more of the big three smart home platforms: Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, and Google Home.

Expectation vs. Reality

The original vision for smart home automation was a cohesive, connected home where every smart device worked harmoniously and communicated naturally with the rest.

Reality hasn’t been so simple. Most people who have invested in smart home automation for their own homes are locked into specific brands or a specific smart home platform. Or they have to manage multiple smart systems that don’t communicate.

Fortunately, all this seems poised to change.

At the massive tech trade show CES 2023, a new smart home protocol was a dominant topic. It’s called Matter, and it promises to change the game.

Introducing Matter

Matter, formerly known as Connected Home over IP (CHIP), is a new standardized smart home protocol.

We know this can get a little confusing, so before we continue, let’s define a couple of terms.

• Smart home protocol: a communications protocol, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or Z-Wave, that uses radio frequencies or other technologies to allow devices to send and receive signals wirelessly.

• Smart home platform: an ecosystem or operating system for smart devices. Amazon Alexa is a platform, not a protocol.

It might help to think about it like this. If the smart home platform is a shared language that allows devices to understand one another, the smart home protocol is the shared technology that allows devices to send communications back and forth.

So with that context in place, let’s get back to Matter. Technically a protocol, Matter is a little bit of both shared language and shared tech. And it, er, matters, because nearly all the major makers of smart home devices and all the smart home platforms are signing on.

Once Matter’s rollout is complete, nearly any smart device will be able to communicate over your local network (wired or wireless) using a shared language, no matter which manufacturer makes the device or which platform you prefer to use.

Is Matter the Future?

So is Matter the future of smart home automation? We can’t say for sure. But we can say this: since the dawn of the smart home era, we’ve never been closer to a shared, near-universal language and protocol than we are now.