Blog

Matter and Thread address different challenges faced by smart home product makers. However, when combined, devices can successfully meet the smart home’s most critical performance and experience expectations.

Thread Group is thrilled to congratulate our liaison partner, the DALI Alliance, for their outstanding achievements at the recent 2025 LFI Innovation Awards during LightFair in Las Vegas.

Thread Group and KNX Association strengthen bonds to support innovative IoT startups in Home and Building automation.

Updated devices will deliver enhanced IoT experiences at home and at work, boosting interoperability and extending network reliability, reach, and performance

In 2014, seven organizations joined forces as The Thread Group with a vision to solve the market and technical challenges inherent to the Internet of Things. What has evolved is a universal approach to seamless, reliable, low-power, and secure wireless connectivity for devices in smart homes and buildings globally.

Thread Group is pleased to announce the Associate membership tier to further foster innovation and interoperability within the IoT.

With Matter becoming the new standard for IoT devices, supported by all major smart home platforms and hundreds of device and accessory makers, more and more of its distinctive and new qualities are becoming apparent to end users and manufacturers alike.

Whether it's for a smart home or a smart building, people want to choose the devices and platforms that are best for them and have confidence they’ll work together. That’s why the new era of the smart home is an open, interoperable one.

As 2023 is coming to a close, we are proud to reflect on all of the accomplishments and milestones Thread has achieved throughout the year.

From its inception, Thread was designed to deliver on the promise of a reliable smart home network: long battery life, low energy footprint, low latency, extended reach, and increased reliability. Instead of using proprietary networking technologies as was common with other protocols at the time, Thread prioritized widespread interconnectivity and was built on IPv6-based network technology, the same protocol that serves as the foundation for the Internet and every home network.

Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, improving energy performance of buildings has become a major cornerstone in the EU efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, and –nearer in the future– to reduce EU emissions by at least 55% by 2030 (“Fit for 55”).

From March 13th until March 17th, Frankfurt will be the home of ISH 2023.

At the beginning of 2023, we celebrated that it’s been 40 years since the precursor of the internet officially moved to the TCP/IP protocol. Designed to be a flexible, versatile protocol to transmit data over large networks of networks, it marked the beginning of what would become an essential part of how we communicate, learn and work today.

As the end of 2022 approaches, I am amazed and impressed by the hard work and milestones we achieved together as the Thread Group this year. With the release of Thread 1.3.0 that supports Matter, and the collaborative effort to enable KNX IoT and DALI+ with Thread, 2022 represented a turning point for the IoT Industry.

It's been seven years since we launched Thread V1.1. Since then, we have seen significant adoption in both the smart home and smart buildings markets. And, Thread Group has grown to more than 130 members who benefit from the Thread technology in many home and building automation use cases.

One of the key benefits of Thread we frequently promote, is that it’s able to deliver low-power, extended-range, mesh-networking capabilities, but without requiring a separate hub. But then, we talk about needing Thread Border Routers in order to connect your Thread devices to the network. Needless to say we get a lot of questions — and sometimes criticism — about this apparent contradiction.

Thread is incredibly honored to be included in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2022 list, which features 200 extraordinary innovations changing our lives.

Thread is changing the way we think about low-power wireless connections for smart devices in both home and commercial building applications. Whereas wireless technologies for IoT devices have existed for quite a while,

Collaborative organizations, such as Thread Group, rely heavily on the hard work and dedication of their members. We are incredibly appreciative for the passion, expertise and commitment of our member organizations.

Interoperability has always been the cornerstone of the KNX standard. Having the opportunity to select from devices and components offered by over 500 KNX manufacturers is the major reason that many smart building vendors, planners, architects and installers have been choosing to base their solutions on KNX for more than 3 decades.

For over three decades, the DALI protocol has been the worldwide standard for interconnecting lighting systems, luminaires, and related devices. DALI’s bi-directional digital interface allows for communication in lighting installations in buildings and other industrial applications, making it possible to offer precise and repeatable lighting control and gathering data from such devices as occupancy sensors and light-level meters.

Thread’s IPv6 based foundation brings many advantages to the Smart Building. Not only can it leverage widely proven cyber security mechanisms, but it can also integrate seamlessly in the existing building network infrastructure.

With the acceleration of major commercial building platforms towards cyber secure IP-networking and the increasing need for a robust, well featured and reliably engineered wireless standard, Thread has become the de-facto wireless networking solution for smart buildings.

As seen by a variety of announcements from smart home device manufacturers and ecosystems in 2021 and at CES 2022, adoption of the Thread standard is gaining momentum. We have shifted from educating the market on what Thread is, to it becoming a universal low-power-mesh IP networking standard for constrained devices.

We are barely into 2022 and, following CES 2022, I couldn’t be more excited for the coming year!

With year-end looming on the horizon, I always like to pause and reflect on the good work and many milestones we together achieve as the Thread Group.

Thread Group’s commitment to improving people’s experience in smart homes and buildings relies on our members, who represent companies across the IoT spectrum. That’s why we’re excited to announce that both Amazon and Samsung SmartThings have joined the Thread Group’s Board of Directors within recent weeks.

Let’s dive a bit deeper in what makes up the topology of a typical network that deploys Thread devices. We start off by explaining the different types of Thread devices on a network, and then go into a bit more detail of the smart home and commercial building networks respectively.

In the years since Thread V1.1 certification launched, the landscape has changed in many exciting ways, as members new and old have seen the promise of Thread technology and proposed enhancements to make it the “go-to” choice for many residential and commercial use cases. As the specification and stacks have evolved, the value of Thread certification has grown even stronger. With the approaching launch of Thread V1.2 certification, it is useful to revisit the general value of certifying products and specifically how that value is realized in Thread certification.

A lot has been happening lately in the world of connected homes and buildings concerning the technologies on which they are based. We see a pattern of growing collaboration between various companies and organizations as well as efforts to increase both convergence and interoperability between various brands, ecosystems and standards. These developments come with new brand names, abbreviations and even some familiar names that are evolving to keep pace with the IoT industry.

With the Project CHIP (Connected Home over IP) standard development in progress, and the first wave of products based on this standard expected to arrive on the market by the end of the year, interest is growing within a large number of markets and industries. Not only the consumer market, but also the commercial and industrial markets are following and contributing to the developments, and with good reasons. 

For quite some time, commercial apartment buildings have been equipped with networked technology. Everything from elevators and security systems, to the lighting and climate control systems, consists of connected devices that communicate with one another to perform efficiently and reliably. For decades, this has been common practice in commercial buildings.

The world of smart buildings and homes is currently undergoing a significant transformation: traditional smart building automation platforms recognize the many advantages of using IP (Internet Protocol) based networks, along with the flexibility of energy efficient, stable and secure wireless connections. Many parties involved with building automation standards are in the process of adapting their platform for these changes. Standardization is of the utmost importance in this process, in order for it to be as cost-effective as possible, offer the highest possible degree of interoperability with legacy systems and generate minimal disruption to existing operations.

2020 was an extremely challenging year for everyone. At Thread Group, we are grateful for our members' commitment to advancing IoT and flexibility in adapting to different ways of working together - virtual everything! 

IP (Internet Protocol) has long been the established standard to interconnect computing devices on networks ranging in size from spanning the globe (the Internet) to local networks in homes and office buildings. The benefits of all of these networks being based on the same networking protocol are clear: easy connectivity, end-to-end addressing and security, and great flexibility and choice of both physical transports and applications. And due to economies of scale, IP-based solutions are widely available at affordable price levels.

Thread Group recently hosted a virtual Panel Session Event regarding Thread’s role in IoT convergence and how that relates to the Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) initiative driven by the Zigbee Alliance.

Thread Group recently hosted a virtual Panel Session Event regarding Thread’s role in IoT convergence and how that relates to the Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) initiative driven by the Zigbee Alliance.

Thread is a secure, low-power, wireless communication protocol that can be seamlessly integrated into a corporate network, or the Internet at large. It compliments and works in tandem with the existing Wi-Fi and ethernet infrastructure. There is no need for a dedicated “hub” or “gateway” which act as a translator between proprietary protocols and the protocol used on the Internet or most enterprise networks. This is because Thread is based on IPv6, the proven version of the Internet Protocol standard.

In December 2019, Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance announced the start of Project CHIP (“Connected Home over IP”, sometimes referred to as “Commercial and Home over IP”) that aims to create a unified standard for communication between smart home devices. Its aim is to simplify development of smart home devices by ensuring that products which conform to the new standard will work with leading ecosystems, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Comcast’s Xfinity.

We at Thread Group see today’s introduction of Project Connected Home over IP via joint announcement from Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance - along with the support and contribution of Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian- as an exciting milestone to accelerate IoT market adoption.

Today, the Thread Group offers four membership tiers.  We are introducing the Implementer membership tier positioned between Affiliate and Contributor.

Enter Thread Border Routers. Since Thread is IPv6, a Thread Border Router can be generic enough to provide connectivity independent of the application protocols in use—just like a Wi-Fi access point. Yet this still creates a chicken and egg problem: end device manufacturers want to make Thread devices but lack the border routers for broader connectivity, and hub manufacturers can't justify adding Thread support to their devices without existing Thread end devices in the market.

Commissioning devices to a Thread-based network using Bluetooth has many benefits. Thread is based on the widely used IEEE 802.15.4 wireless radio standard which was specifically designed for extremely low power operation. All devices on a Thread network form a mesh, which extends the range of the network without additional extender hardware. The entire network is also based on the IPv6 protocol, making it very simple to connect a Thread network to an enterprise network with a simple border router, enabling end-to-end encrypted communication from the cloud all the way to individual devices.

Numerous wired and wireless solutions for connecting IoT devices in a home or building exist on the market today. Often, these technologies form a full stack covering the physical connection through the application and control protocols that run on top of it. Though this might sound good for interoperability, it can also result in some severe drawbacks.

"IoT is hard." So much so, that a whopping 75 percent of all IoT projects fail. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, but often it stems from not having the right technology for the challenge of building connected products.

My home is set up in a way that’s probably familiar to many of you. I’ve got about 20 smart home devices. Some joined to third-party IoT hubs. Some connected to their own bridges and apps. All connected up into each vendor’s cloud service, each with its own proprietary API. These are then linked to some other cloud service used by a controller like an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or smart home app.