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ZigBee Wireless Standard Ratified
ductormalef writes "Today, the ZigBee Alliance announced the release (pdf) of version 1.0. ZigBee is a standard for low data-rate (250kbps max) wireless personal area networks (WPANs). It utilizes the IEEE 802.15.4 hardware and MAC layers which utilize frequency bands at 898MHz, 902-928MHz, and 2.4GHz. ZigBee supports mesh networking and claims to be 'wireless control that simply works.' They claim to be a solution to everything from wireless home automation to industrial control."
ZigBee supports mesh networking and claims to be 'wireless control that simply works.' They claim to be a solution to everything from wireless home automation to industrial control.
We'll see how this works. The last factory we worked in, we had to use fiber (10MB at that) because cables would have too much interference.
"ZigBee: Wireless Control that Simply Works"
From my days in compsci classes, anything that simply works usually isn't working at all.
A new door opens in the world of aerial communism...
Think about it. Blades became the rage a while ago. Blade = sharp. Bluetooth. Tooth=sharp. I always liked firewire just because of the name. IEEE1394 is just not the same.
ZigBee. Well, I guess Bee=stinger=sharp, but that is stretching it. Especially with a nonsensical "Zig" thrown in.
This might sound funny, but the name is the thing, especially in corporations.
Yeah, right!
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
All I could think is that I'm allergic to bee stings.
It's essentially a wireless networking scheme that layers on top of an independant physical platform, yet costs significant dough to get certified for. Very clever scheme. Too bad they haven't included really interesting things in their design. All it lays out is the full node/slave node/coordinator node network. It really should have things like dynamic reconfiguration of the network structure. I think it's around 7500$ to become a 'zigbee partner' and then another indeterminate amount to become zigbee compliant/certified. That doesn't even include the royalties for using the stack commercially. The underlying hardware interface however... is very interesting.
I'm also not sure I want my home devices on an unauthenticated wireless network.
A spread-frequency digital communications system is really useful (802.15.4 standard). It also doesn't have the associated royaly issues.
WPAN.....isn't this the job of Bluetooth ? Great, not only we have HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, and PSP vs. DS, UMTS vs. WiMax, NOW we have to worry about Bluetooth versus ZigBee!!
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll happily keep my BT appliances.
Vendors shipped 165 million cell phones worldwide in the third quarter of 2004. In-start/MDR predicts 653 million units to be shipped this year. So, even by 2004 numbers, Zigbee will be in less than 1% of new cell phones shipped next year if they hit their target. Bluetooth, on the other hand, ships two million units per week in various devices. Perhaps it "will be big", but you need far stronger numbers to back up your prediction.
Heile says it'll be "on target for 5 million units"? Your own article reports that he also said "analysts are predicting between 5 million and 50 million Zigbee devices in the first year", which means Zigbee might make the low end of predictions.
Also, $5 per unit is a huge cost for cell phone vendors. Nokia, for instance, would have to pay over $1 billion a year (~200 million units, excluding engineering costs) to support this in all their phones. To put that number in perspective, that's about a good quarter's worth of net profit for Nokia.
In other words, like any new technology, it will become much cheaper with wide adoption, but it will not be widely adopted unless it's cheap. Its future may be interesting, but is by no means assured. I simply don't see the evidence for your optimism.