Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that the thing limiting Z-Wave is their choice for a very low speed
network. It's going to be hard to achieve ubiquity when your system cannot
ever be used to even transmit media metadata, much less media data. No
powerline technology really could even be used for either of those things
either I don't think. Zigbee seems to be the only one that could really have
a chance at being a fairly ubiquitious wireless control technology that
could move up out of the trivial amounts of data involved in turning some
lights on and off.  It could not transmit media data, but it could transmit
metadata and some other small stuff.

But, in the end, media is going to be the single biggest driver of
acceptance of home automation technologies. Actually, it may already be.
Therefore the system will have to use a backbone that supports media data,
which pretty much means the ethernet network in any practical sense at this
point. There are some other technical possibilities, but no one seems to be
really in a position to push them (such as Firewire.)

If you've already got an ethernet based automation/media backbone, it seems
to me that anyone who can build on that backbone, providing just the small
amount of extra stuff required, would have the best chance. For instance,
something like Zigbee but very localized, so that you can hang several
transmitter/receiver devices off of the ethernet network around the home to
get very good coverage and good speed. So you can provide retrofit friendly
support for lighting and a few other things that would benefit from being
wirelessly controlled, but not have the data speed downside and coverage
problems and limits on modules that come with existing wireless/powerline
technologies.

Wireless IP would be optimum in that scenario, but it doesn't seem like
anyone has managed to get close to providing the small, cheap wireless IP
package that would be required.

The downside of course is that IP networks for the home have to get a lot
smarter and self managing. As the vendor of a networked automation product,
we have a fair amount of problems that are not related to our product but to
the network itself. It's too easy to get two machines on the same address,
or to mess up network settings or DHCP settings, or firewall settings and so
forth.

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Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd
www.charmedquark.com