so that smartphone in your pocket or the smartphone you're using to watch this
video right now almost certainly supports wi-fi bluetooth and some kind
of cellular connection and seeing as how modern phones are designed to be
do-it-all devices you might think that it has every important wireless protocol
covered but wait there are a couple others with similar names that are
actually quite widespread in the consumer space zigbee and z-wave but
what exactly are they and why do they exist is the tech industry just trying
to fleece us because they think consumers perceive anything with the
letter z in it to be edgy and cool not quite it's like this zigbee and z-wave
are primarily focused on smart home applications rather than other kinds of
data transmission but hold on a sec james i have smart wi-fi controlled
lights and bluetooth speakers that work just fine why do we need totally
different protocols just so i can unlock my front door from my phone it turns out
that zigbee and z-wave have real technical advantages that make
them better performing and more reliable for home automation a big one is power
consumption you see although wi-fi is incredibly versatile it hogs a lot of
power which makes sense considering wi-fi is used for bandwidth heavy
applications like streaming video and gaming but you simply don't need a whole
lot of bandwidth to tell your front door to lock your garage to shut or your
smart light bulb to turn pink and even something like a smart home security
sensor can trigger an alarm simply by telling the base station hey this door
is open this means that you don't need very much speed which results in
huge power savings very important for smart home devices which are often small
and designed to be placed anywhere without the need to be plugged in both
zigbee and z-wave operate at speeds well below 300 kilobytes per second meaning
that they aren't much faster than an old dial-up modem
but the result in power savings mean that many smart home devices can last
for over two years without needing a battery swap but hold on again james you
might be saying bluetooth is also quite low power so why don't we just use that
well as anyone who's ever gotten too far from the bluetooth speaker knows most
bluetooth revisions are quite range limited which can be a huge problem if
you're trying to deploy smart home tech in something other than a small
apartment zigbee and z-wave however work as mesh networks where each device acts
as a node to send the signal on to the target device so even if your smart home
hub is downstairs and the thermostat you're trying to control is on the third
floor your signal can be routed through your smart light fixture and your smoke
detector to get there and if we're talking about z-wave specifically it
operates on a lower frequency than wi-fi meaning longer ranges between nodes
zigbee operates on the more congested 2.4 gigahertz bandwidth which is often
used by wi-fi though it makes up for this limitation somewhat by being able
to hop through as many devices as it needs whereas z-wave is limited to just
four hops and remember that whichever protocol you use many battery-only smart
home devices aren't designed to be used as hops since
this would drain the battery faster on the subject of limitations the biggest
drawback for most people with either zigbee or z-wave is the need for a
central hub to control your gadgets since neither typical routers nor
smartphones or tablets come with zigbee or z-wave support built-in you'll need a
hub of some sort which connects to your router so your phone tablet or computer
can talk to it via wi-fi it'll then send a zigbee or z-wave signal to the devices
you're trying to control so in this way they're not as straightforward as wi-fi
but seeing as so many iot devices have adopted zigbee and z-wave it appears
that the market has decided the benefits outweigh the costs and although there
are competing standards out there like insteon and bluetooth mesh zigbee and
z-wave remain the most common so is one protocol better than the other well
z-wave's longer range and better interoperability as a proprietary
standard with more rigorous testing requirements have led many smart home
enthusiasts to deem it the superior choice but that doesn't mean zigbee is
bad just do your research for the specific
product ecosystem you're buying into and make sure any gadget that you're
thinking about getting doesn't have a ton of reports of buggy software you
don't want your smart solid shooter to start acting up at three in the morning
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