The Nest Hub Max went on sale Monday as the largest Made by Google Smart Display and first with a Nest Cam. It’s also the “world’s first” publicly available “Built on Thread” device, with this support allowing for integrations between existing Nest smart home products.
Thread, the low-power mesh network protocol that Alphabet-owned Nest built in tandem with Samsung, ARM, and other companies, is now going open-source. Since it opened membership in October of 2014, the not-completely-open “Thread Group” has grown to have over 30 products. But this OpenThread release takes things a step further in the name of openness…
Wifi and Bluetooth may work fine for today’s limited number of smart home devices, but neither is ideal for future homes in which every switch, socket and lightbulb may be a connected device – that’s the claim of a consortium of companies that includes Samsung, Nest and ARM.
GigaOM reports that the companies have jointly created a new radio system which they believe is more suited to smart home networks than existing systems.
Dubbed Thread, it is a low-power, mesh network protocol that also supports IPv6. The standard is built on the existing radio hardware used by ZigBee devices (802.15.4), which means that a company could update their ZigBee devices to support Thread with software if they chose …