The Thread Group announced that the Google Nest Hub Max smart display successfully passed its rigorous specification compliance and interoperability testing to become the first certified and publicly available Built on Thread device. The Thread Group conducts tests against multiple vendor configurations to ensure that technology from different manufacturers can ultimately communicate, reliably and securely. The Nest Hub Max has proven its ability to do this and joins the growing roster of Thread-certified solutions, which currently includes more than 20 components.
The Nest Hub Max can connect to more than 30,000 smart devices from more than 3,500 vendors with the Google Assistant and the Smart Home and Local Home SDKs. Nest Hub Max's Thread support brings the Internet and the rest of the Google Nest home directly and securely to small, power-constrained devices without expensive, proprietary gateways. For example, as a Built on Thread certified device, Nest Hub Max can pair with the Nest x Yale Lock and can extend the range of either Nest Secure or Nest Connect. In the future, Nest Hub Max will be compatible with other Built on Thread certified products, regardless of their manufacturer.
“As a founding board member of the Thread Group, Google has long understood the challenges of IoT, as well as the possibilities and user benefits unlocked by technology like Thread,” noted Grant Erickson, president of the Thread Group. “With that foresight, they’ve been committed to Thread for more than five years, supporting and driving its development and adoption across the IoT industry’s biggest players.”
Thread requires less power relative to comparable solutions, which improves the battery life of devices across its network. Thread’s self-healing mesh network delivers a reliable and robust network that is complementary to WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which is critical to delivering on the promise of true IoT for consumers.
Regardless of the specific connectivity technologies used, Thread helps devices talk to different clouds, while simultaneously running multiple application layers, such as Dotdot, OCF or Weave. It does all of this without any additional hardware or software, which saves developers time and money, and promises the end-user a lower cost, less power-hungry solution.
Thread’s future-proof technology means certified devices can easily migrate to the Thread 1.2 specification - announced in June 2019 - which improves the network’s energy efficiency, latency and node density. Thread 1.2 offers optional support for Bluetooth Low Energy devices, such as smartphones, and standardizes Thread out-of-band commissioning over Bluetooth, making it possible for devices with only a Bluetooth Low Energy radio to be a native part of a Thread mesh network.
Nest Hub Max's Built on Thread certification implementation is based on OpenThread, a Thread-certified open-source implementation of the Thread networking protocol, released by Google and adopted by a number of Thread-certified components.