Thread Group Calls Out 'Inaccuracies' in GreenPeak White Paper Slamming It
The Thread Group bashed a GreenPeak white paper, issued last week, stating that “it will be a real challenge for Thread to rise to the level of being a strong contender against ZigBee 3.0.” In the white paper, GreenPeak CEO…
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Cees Links cited ZigBee 3.0’s “years of experience in many application domains,” including lighting control, home automation, building automation and retail, and he said that more than 1,000 ZigBee products have been certified. “Next to the application framework layer, there is a battle going on at the networking level,” Links said, “and the clear contender is ZigBee 3.0 with Thread as the challenger.” A spokeswoman for the Thread Group told us that the GreenPeak white paper “seeks to compare two different technologies with very different functions, and contains a significant number of inaccuracies.” The GreenPeak white paper referred to Thread as “still under wraps today,” although the spokeswoman noted that the Thread spec has been released to members, technical white papers have been released to the public and the Thread certification program will go live this fall, led by UL (see 1507140064). The Thread Group announced “a collaborative partnership with ZigBee in April, and membership in Thread does not preclude participation in ZigBee, nor vice versa,” the spokeswoman said. “Because Thread is application layer-agnostic, a future version of ZigBee's application layer protocol could very well run on top of Thread networks, and Thread expects to announce more similar relationships in the future.” As recently as last month, GreenPeak issued a news release announcing peaceful co-existence with Thread. “As ZigBee is the dominant communication technology for wireless sensor networks and Thread will quickly become a prevailing player in the same IoT communication space, application developers and device manufacturers need a future-proof solution that can combine both communication protocols for connected home applications," Links said in that news release (see 1506300013). He positioned GreenPeak's GP712, capable of supporting multiple protocols in normal operation, as such a solution. “Both ZigBee and Thread will be dominant in the Smart Home and IoT,” Links said, and the GP712 would support "concurrent, transparent and complimentary ZigBee and Thread network application processing, all in the same design, at no extra cost.”