Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Robert L Bass" <robertbass1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0_idnR8JF58Wq-LYnZ2dnUVZ_sOknZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Z-Wave is not a media distribution medium.  It is intended to control
> lights and appliances.  For that it doesn't need a high speed network.
>  A few bytes of data are enough to operate almost anything targeted by
> Z-Wave.

But the point is, why have two backbones when one will do? Given the heavy
requirement for media these days, and its continued growth moving forward,
which Z-Wave could never handle, and the ubiquity of ethernet, there's a
good argument that having a separate backbone is just adding complexity when
there's already something there that could provide a better solution. If you
have a large house, Z-Wave just wouldn't be a good option. A message would
have to take many hops to get to its destination. You really want multiple
broadcast points all of which have a fast wired connection back to the
automation system, which the network would provide.

It's not just my opinion that media will be the biggest driver of
automation. It's a pretty widely held opinion in the automation world these
days. And we didn't build a system that has good media support just for fun,
we did it because we get many times over more interest by having that media
support. It's absolutely essential for a company of our sort to be strong in
media management these days, and you can see that by all the moves made by
all the automation companies to get their media support in shape.

Once you get out of our group here of hard core geeks, it's hard to talk
someone into why they need to have an automation system for lighting, but
tell them that they can surf their media on a touch screen in each room and
whatnot, and drive their home theater from a touch screen, and they get the
point of that. I think that the bulk of our customers are implementing media
management of some sort, either theater control or multi-zone audio/video,
whereas few of them have security.

> Hmm.  The only control technology that comes close to ubiquity
> is X10 and it does so without so much as a nod to media distribution.
> There's a reason for that.  While entertainment distribution and HA
> have overlapping markets they are not congruent.  In fact, most HA
> projects do not control entertainment hardware.

I dunno. I think your position is out of date now, though I'm sure it was
correct even a few years ago. But if you read our forums or AVS' automation
forum, there is a lot of discussion of media management. I think we'd cut
our sales in half if we weren't strong in this area. And the fact that we
provide both the automation system and the media management system in one
integrated package is helping us a lot. There's no need to integrate
multiple systems together and the two are intimately tied together.

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