Silicon Labs' virtual Works With Conference, Sept. 13-15, will focus on the Matter standard and other trends driving the future of the IoT, the company said Thursday. Works With will offer developers and engineers insights needed to build, deploy and connect solutions, said Silicon Labs, the primary semiconductor code contributor to Matter. In a keynote, Silicon Labs CEO Matt Johnson will discuss opportunities for smart connected devices in home, cities, commercial and industrial applications, along with executives from Google Smart Home Ecosystem, Amazon Sidewalk and Alexa Smart Home. The event is free.

With the Matter protocol due to be released this fall, the Z-Wave Alliance is “doing our best to keep Z-Wave in the conversation,” Z-Wave Alliance Executive Director Mitchell Klein told us Thursday. Z-Wave isn’t directly compatible with Matter, but Z-Wave products should be able to be interoperable with Matter via “hooks” in the protocol that will allow non-Matter products to work with Matter-certified devices, Klein said. “There is a hook available to provide bridging in and out,” and Silicon Labs has done proof of concept of the Unify software developer kit software framework, said Klein, who also is Silicon Labs director-alliances strategy. The Z-Wave Alliance has a specification for building such a bridge on its roadmap, Klein said, because “the marketplace will demand some type of interoperability with Matter; otherwise, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of products going dark, or just basically resisting Matter completely.” Timing for a bridge hasn’t been made public, but Silicon Labs said last fall that more than 15 million IoT gateway products developed using Silicon Labs' Series 1 and Series 2 wireless solutions, at the core of the new Unify SDK, will be Matter-compatible once the protocol is approved for market availability. “Similarly, companies can choose to develop IoT products using the Silicon Labs Unify SDK for existing wireless protocols, including Zigbee and Z-Wave, and later leverage Unify SDK to easily activate Matter network communication on their product portfolios when the timing is right,” the company said then. The Z-Wave Alliance said Thursday the 4,000th product had been certified Z-Wave-compatible, but the Switzerland-based company, Hoppe Group, wants to delay announcing the product until its release on the market, due this fall, Klein said. The Hoppe product includes the Z-Wave Long Range specification.

The global multi-access edge computing (MEC) market will expand from $8.8 billion this year to $22.7 billion in five years on increasing 5G requirements for on-premises machine learning and low-latency connectivity, said Juniper Research Monday. Over 3.4 million MEC nodes will be deployed by 2027 with autonomous vehicles and smart cities key beneficiaries of expanding MEC rollouts. Enabling the handling of data generated by connections processed at network edges will reduce network strain by decreasing the physical distance that cellular data needs to travel, it said.

The global cellular IoT market will reach $61 billion in value by 2026, rising from $31 billion in 2022, with the growth of 5G and cellular low-power wide area (LPWA) technologies the key drivers, reported Juniper Research Tuesday. LPWA solutions such as narrowband IoT will be the fastest-growing cellular IoT technologies within the forecast period, with LPWA connections expected to grow 1,200%, said Juniper. 5G IoT services will generate $9 billion in global revenue by 2026, rising from $800 million in 2021, it said: That's "growth of 1,000% over the next five years as 5G coverage expands and operators benefit from the increased number of 5G IoT connections.”

Silicon Labs introduced the BG24 and MG24 families of 2.4 GHz wireless SoCs for Bluetooth and multiple-protocol operations. The “co-optimized” hardware and software platform will help bring AI/machine learning applications and wireless high performance to battery-powered edge devices, the company said Monday. With support for Matter, Zigbee, OpenThread, Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth mesh, proprietary and multi-protocol operation, the SoCs have the highest level of industry security certification, ultra-low power capabilities and the largest memory and flash capacity in the company’s portfolio, it said. Applications include home security systems, wearable medical monitors, sensors monitoring commercial facilities and industrial equipment.

The Chinese Wi-Fi IoT market is projected to expand at a 29% compound annual growth rate over the next five years, reaching 916.6 million connections in 2026 from 252 million in 2021, reported ABI Research Wednesday. COVID-19 pandemic-induced remote work fueled consumer demand for “cohesive home environments,” stimulating the growth of smart home applications enabled by IoT devices using Wi-Fi connectivity, it said. “To meet the surging Wi-Fi demand, the Chinese market has been ramping up manufacturing capabilities through support plans provided by the government and the emergence of new vendors to ease the strain felt from the global chip shortage,” said analyst Andrew Zignani. ABI forecasts the global Wi-Fi IoT market will grow to 6.7 billion connections by 2026, nearly a threefold increase from 2021, it said: “With a population strength of around 1.4 billion, China alone makes up approximately 40% of the global Wi-Fi IoT market. This indicates the strong prospects for the Chinese Wi-Fi ecosystem, where Wi-Fi-enabled applications and services would be driven by the proliferation of IoT.”

Australia's Fleet Space Technologies wants FCC OK for U.S. market access to offer IoT service with 40 low earth orbit satellites operating on UHF frequencies. In an International Bureau petition Tuesday, Fleet said it has six small satellites in orbit now, plans to launch another mid-2022 and then start batches of deployments in late 2022 that will lead to its constellation being completed in 2028. It said it eventually plans to up the constellation size to 200 and would seek that authorization later.

An Amazon Web Services outage midday Tuesday took out a swath of gaming logins, streaming video services and cloud-based events, including the Vizio investor presentation at a virtual UBS technology conference. Amazon reported “impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The outage affected some of Amazon’s monitoring and incident response tooling, “which is delaying our ability to provide updates,” said Amazon, saying it “identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery.” The Verge reported outages for Disney+ streaming and games and some problems accessing Amazon.com, the Alexa voice assistant, Kindle ebooks, Amazon Music and Ring security cameras. “There are reports from network admins everywhere about errors connecting to Amazon’s instances and the AWS Management Console that controls their access to the servers,” said the Verge. The webpage for Vizio’s event said the presentation was being recorded and the replay “will be posted as soon as the AWS Network is back up.”

After years of the IoT serving niche applications and specialized use cases, trends are converging to push it mainstream by creating new ways for products and services to interact with individuals, the cloud environment and potentially “thousands of applications,” said a Tuesday Technicolor report. Advances in processing power, automation and intelligence have evolved over the past decade at the same time costs have dropped for sensors that connect devices to hubs. “The biggest difference between where we are today and where we were five years ago is that IoT is increasingly seen as a mainstream technology that is accepted as an important part of the fabric that defines our digital lives,” said Girish Naganathan, chief technology officer, Technicolor Connected Home. IoT applications are emerging in building management, energy efficiency, industrial IoT and connected spaces, said Naganathan. Brownfield development in IoT-enabled durable goods like appliances and cars allows software created on top of legacy systems to coexist with products and software that have been in production for decades, he said. Combining IoT capabilities with legacy technologies allows a manufacturer to alert users that a system is about to fail and trigger a service call, he said. Greenfield development in IoT -- products created from the ground up for internet connectivity -- is “fundamentally changing user experiences,” he said, giving connected thermostats, smart locks and TVs as examples. IoT is playing a central role in transforming home gateways and set-top boxes that manage broadband traffic for in-home consumption, evolving from supporting proprietary single-function applications and devices to platforms that manage an array of complex services within the home, he noted. That trend is “unleashing new economic activity that is being enhanced by new innovative services in the cloud.” The IoT opens a new world of business models, technologies and services to create “integrated experiences that are intuitive and secure,” said Naganathan. It will be important for companies to forge and nurture long-term IoT relationships “that integrate complex technologies and go-to-market strategies” that are “frictionless experiences” for consumers and businesses, he said.

Commenters sought flexible use rules for spectrum, in replies on an FCC IoT notice of inquiry, posted Wednesday in docket 21-353. Initial comments highlighted disagreements about the need for more unlicensed versus licensed spectrum (see 2111020038). “Continuing to free up spectrum for flexible, commercial uses is the best way to ensure that the spectrum foundation for IoT remains strong,” CTA said: “Such flexible spectrum policies have been successful and have facilitated the popularity and growth of IoT.” In initial comments, carriers, satellite operators, Wi-Fi advocates and others asserted they have a strong role to play in the IoT, Cisco said. All are correct, the company said. “The IoT is a collection of diverse spectrum-based technologies and highly diverse applications that continues to be a focus of growth and revenue, and one that will have profound impacts,” Cisco said: “Facilitating multiple IoT technologies through the availability of spectrum is the best practice.” The IoT requires “licensed, lightly licensed and unlicensed spectrum,” Microsoft commented. Different uses will inevitably “gravitate” to certain bands, the company said: “For many IoT applications, the cost and availability of sufficient unlicensed spectrum for indoor use are the principal considerations. But for certain use cases, IoT over licensed spectrum will have clear advantages.” Inmarsat agreed with comments the FCC “should support the growth of IoT with flexible use policies and spectrum allocations that accommodate IoT use cases, but that do not favor a particular communications technology over another.” Flexibility “enables operators to put spectrum to its highest and best use in a dynamic marketplace,” the company said. The record “demonstrates the importance of unlicensed and shared spectrum for current and future” IoT applications, said NCTA: “A small group of commenters assert that unlicensed and shared spectrum are not secure enough for important IoT applications and that no more spectrum is needed in the near term for unlicensed or shared use. These commenters are incorrect.” Rules should “ensure maximum flexibility,” said Public Knowledge and New America’s Open Technology Institute. “Extending dynamic spectrum sharing frameworks to additional bands in low-, mid- and high-frequency spectrum clearly benefits the public interest as it promotes the most efficient and effective use of the airwaves while simultaneously stimulating competitive access to a resource traditionally dominated by the largest mobile carriers.”