Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance have formed a new working group to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet, by developing and promoting the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard.
Zigbee Alliances board member companies are also on board to join the working group and contribute to the project.
Built around the belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable and seamless to use, the Connected Home over IP project is designed to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers.
The project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services by building upon Internet Protocol (IP), and to define a set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol.
The project intends to utilise contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from the four founding companies as well as others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
Manufacturers should benefit from the project, finding it easier to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services.
The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and working group members are encouraging manufacturers to continue innovating using technology already available.
Project Connected Home over IP invites device manufacturers, silicon providers, and other developers from across the smart home industry to contribute to the new standard.
A new website has been formed to represent the Connected Home over IP project:
www.connectedhomeip.com