The Internet of Things Has a Language Problem

If it seems that everything around you is "smart" now, just give it five years, when it’s predicted there’ll be 50 billion connected devices out in the world. That communicative thermostat you thought was so clever will just be one device in your smart home of ubiquitous connectivity.

But while the potential for smart everything has developers in a frenzy, there's another shining opportunity for development: the protocols these products use to communicate.

This week, a team of IoT heavy-hitters made a media splash with Thread, their solution to getting the things speaking the same language. Thread, which is backed by Samsung and Google-owned Nest, among other big names, is a networking protocol designed to help the things get chatty within your home.

The group's website pretty much presents it as the only option. "It’s hard to get multiple devices to talk to one another," it reads. "And until now, no one has been able to do it well.:

Chris Boross, president of the Thread Group and technical product marketing manager at Nest Labs, echoed that in a phone interview. "There are some great technologies out there, but they just weren’t really suitable for home products," he said.

But much as Thread might want to be the solution for connecting stuff on the Internet of Things, it's got a few other contenders to battle. Bluetooth Smart (aka BLE) is one of the main players in the standards race, and no doubt has a bit of an edge due to its recognisable name.

In response to the launch of Thread, a rep from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group told the EE Times that Bluetooth Smart "is the de facto standard for the Internet of Things" and argued that as it was already in smartphones and computers, it was the one to take the smart home mainstream.

The Register pointed out that Google—which bought Thread champion Nest earlier this year—actually uses Bluetooth Smart for its Android TV.

Then there’s ZigBee, for which self-proclaimed "wireless evangelist" Nick Hunn suggests Thread might be the death knell. ZigBee found its way into Nest devices but, as Gigaom reported, has suffered problems with interoperability. Another protocol vying for a (smart) home is Z-Wave. If you haven't heard of any of these, don’t worry. They’re not the kind of thing you get excited about, but the technical protocols that enable those kind of things. Think of them like a wifi for objects; the less you have to worry about them, the better they're working.

In fact, wifi is potentially another option, but as we've seen before it’s just not really appropriate for communication between things in close quarters, where key requirements are low power (you don’t want to be recharging your smart stuff all the time), security, and reliability, and you only need to transfer small amounts of data. Boross sees Thread as "a second network in your home to augment wifi."

So what does Thread bring to the table that's new? Boross told me the company developed it specifically to work with IPv6, "the future version of IP for the internet at large." (We currently mainly use IPv4). Devices will need a chip with a standard 802.15.4 radio to use Thread.

It works as a low-power mesh network so your things can communicate with your other things—up to 250 devices on a single network. You can then use wifi to get that info over to your phone or the cloud, and so on. This mesh concept sets it apart from things like Z-Wave, where you need to use a translator device.

According to Boross, that centralised gateway point poses a risk: "If that gateway device fails for any reason, the whole Z-Wave network will basically fall apart."

As for Bluetooth, he said that was a whole different idea. "I don’t really compare it. I think Bluetooth is great for certain things but I don’t think it’s really applicable to the Thread problem space we were solving for," he said. "Maybe over time it will be."

There are obvious advantages to being "the one." To have their products use Thread, companies will have to apply for membership and pay an annual fee. Then a product certification process will start in 2015.

"The purpose of that is to be able to guarantee that any device, service, whatever is created that’s Thread-enabled meets the Thread specifications," said Sujata Neidig, Thread's vice-president of marketing and business development manager at Freescale Semiconductor, one of the companies behind Thread.

It's a lucrative position to corner, and if our entire homes are going to be connected, it makes sense that everything inside them should be communicating on one network, if only to avoid confusion for consumers. Ultimately, one will probably win out as the go-to protocol, and the things will have their say.