Key standards for smart homes: ZigBee Alliance

ZigBee is a global, open, low-power, wireless mesh networking standard, with more than 400 members from around the world developing products and solutions for a variety of applications including home automation, home security, smart metering, building automation, health care monitoring and many others. The alliance boasts multiple vendors in each sector of the ecosystem, offering products and services proven by deployments of more than 40 million smart meters around the world, and US nationwide deployments of home control/security systems from giants such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Rogers and so on.

The adoption rates and market for low-power, standards-based wireless technologies are experiencing dramatic growth. The need to connect the widest possible range of devices and provide more control to people in their living and work environments is driving the growth. With huge deployments in the smart grid as well as homes and buildings across the world, the creation of infrastructures that will be leveraged for connecting both powered and battery-operated devices into an Internet of Things to improve energy management, increase comfort, convenience and security, and spawn many new innovations.

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