What is Thread and how will it help your smart home? - The Verge

New smart home products from Eve, Nanoleaf, Wemo, and Schlage work over Thread, a low-power protocol that is key to the Matter. Here’s everything you need to know about Thread.

As the new smart home standard Matter gets closer to launch, connected devices built on Thread — a technology that’s integral to Matter — are starting to roll out. In the last year, Eve, Nanoleaf, Schlage, and Wemo have released smart home gadgets such as motion sensors, light bulbs, door locks, smart plugs, and motorized blinds that run on Thread. But just what is Thread, and why does it matter to Matter?

I sat down with three Thread Group board members to find out how this “new” protocol (it’s actually been around since 2015) promises to fix many of the smart home’s biggest issues: reliability, speed, connectivity, and scale. I spoke with Vividh Siddha, president of the Thread Group and director of software engineering at Apple, Jonathan Hui, vice president of technology for Thread and principal software engineer at Google, and Sujata Neidig, vice president of marketing for Thread and director of marketing at NXP.

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As you may have spotted in those bios, Thread — like Matter — is being developed by a consortium of competing companies in the smart home industry. Only Thread started much earlier than Matter. “In 2015, several companies got together and identified a problem in the industry and that we can work together to bring a solution to the market,” says Neidig.

That problem was how to securely and simply connect all the various devices in the consumer smart home. The solution they came up with was Thread, an IPv6-based wireless protocol that could create “a secure, robust, reliable, and simple-to-use network.” Today, Thread is run by a board of directors that includes representatives from Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung SmartThings, Qualcomm, NXP, Assa Abloy (owners of Yale and August), Lutron, and more.

https://www.theverge.com/23165855/thread-smart-home-protocol-matter-apple-google-interview

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