I'm in the process of buying a new house. I'm planning on moving all my current smarthome gear over. It's mostly Zooz zwave switches, motion sensors, open/close sensors, and temp sensors. Most of the devices are zwave 700 series, but there are some 500 and 800 devices in the mix.
We are probably going to make a trip to Ikea within the next month to get some furniture, and I was looking at their smart home devices and they have really good prices. Whether or not they are good devices... I have no idea. But after a little researching I realized all these devices are matter over thread. I don't have anything that is a thread border router, so I assume that just means I can't use any of it. When I Google "What can I use as a thread border router?" I see lists of devices that I do not plan on owning....
But I'm also confused about how Hubitat would even talk to the thread network. I know Matter is an application layer protocol, while thread is in the network layer. So I assume that Hubitat communicates with the thread border routers over IP (I assume locally) and tells it "tell device X to do Y" and the border router will send updates from the devices to Hubitat. But everything I've read about thread says it's best to have multiple border routers for redundancy. So that means buying even more devices that I wouldn't plan on buying otherwise... How does Hubitat know which border router to send a command to? Or does it send to all of them, something like multicast?
Honestly... it sorta makes me want to stick with zwave. The Ikea devices are very tempting though; especially the remote control.
A starter here:
Ikea's new Thread stuff seems to have some pretty widespread growing pains right now in terms of flaky performance... You can google around for more about that, but I expect they'll eventually sort it out.
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A Thread Border Router acts as a bi-directional bridge between a Thread Mesh Network and your home LAN. Matter uses IPv6 (it creates its own private IPv6 network behind the scenes) that lives on top of Ethernet/WiFi/Thread.
Just like Zigbee and Z-Wave, Matter over Thread devices need multiple repeater-capable devices to strengthen the Thread Mesh Network. Since this requires non-sleepy devices to act as repeaters, the devices need to be mains-powered, just like for Zigbee and Z-Wave. The difference that I see is that most (not all) mains-powered Matter devices are “Matter over WiFi” devices, which do not help with strengthening the Thread mesh network at all. Thus, many people choose to add more AppleTV 4K’s, Google Home Hub’s, or Amazon Echo’s with built-in Thread Border Routers to help strengthen the Thread mesh network. Then the problem becomes possibly having multiple Thread mesh networks, one from each brand of devices, which do not help each other whatsoever. That problem is supposed to get better with Thread v1.4, which has been a slow rollout amongst the big three companies.
Right now, I would agree with you. Sticking with Zigbee, Z-Wave, and possibly Lutron will make for a solid smart home.
IMHO, Matter over WiFi devices are actually somewhat decent and reliable. Matter over Thread is a bit of the Wild West. It will improve over the coming years, but it has some maturing to do to get everything to work together smoothly. The new IKEA devices are a perfect example of just how much more maturing is required.
If you want to read about recent experiences of Hubitat users with those new IKEA devices, start here.
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