I see it more like the WiFi market. Before WiFi was standardized, there were many unique wireless LANs, but they were hard to set up and the market remained small. The standardization of WiFi created a huge market where all WiFi devices can work together well and vendors still found ways to make money.
In any case, vendors who want to hedge their risk will have to implement it (and do it well), otherwise the real risk is to be cut out of the market as it expands.
I'm using my C8 for zigbee but my old C7 is reserved for lan-only sensors. Would be nice if my c7 antenna can be re-purposed for thread instead of needing to adding a "c9" to the mix.
The meager releases recently and the fact they were not released by "bruce" made me think he left the company. I'm glad to know that they are just busy.
Could they allow users to choose how the 2.4ghz antenna is used? Like if you want only Thread and no Zigbee? Iām keeping my Zigbee bulbs on my hue hub at the moment.
That would be a cool solution - we could just keep ZigBee on a C7 or add a second C8 if Zigbee 3.0 is needed.
Many devices that most users already have at least one of in their home are already Matter Thread Border Routers. Per the Matter specification, multiple Thread Border Routers (TBR) can co-exist on the same Thread mesh network. They can divide up the various workloads, and also provide full redundancy when needed. TBR bridge Matter over Thread to Matter over WiFi/Ethernet to allow communications with Matter Controllers.
This is very, very similar to how Apple Home (was HomeKit) 'Hubs' behave today. I have multiple AppleTVs and a HomePod Mini that all take their turns at being my Apple Home Hub, whenever I update and reboot one of them for a firmware update.
Apple made sure that this same high-level design was carried over in the Matter specification for Thread Border Routers. Thus, if users already have a modern Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod/AppleTV, then they already have devices capable of acting as Thread Border Routers. This means that any Matter Controller on the same network can 'see' and 'control' all of these Thread devices.
It should be noted that not all Thread devices, especially the older ones, are Matter compatible. Thread is just a 802.15.4 2.4GHz wireless protocol. Vendors created Thread based devices before the Matter standard was released. Thus, an old Thread device that works today on an Apple HomeKit system, will not work on a Matter Thread network without a vendor firmware update. Often, these early Matter firmware updates have left users frustrated with the lack of some original functionality of their old device. This is caused by the fact that the Matter specification only defines the most common, base capabilities for each type of device. Whereas early Thread devices were much more custom, and required device specific driver support on each platform they were used with (primarily with Apple HomeKit over Thread.)
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