Z-Wave LR

Does anyone have any idea when we can expect to see these on the market?

No. Manufacturing issues, shipping issues, chip supply issues, certification issues... The list goes on and on.

1 Like

@JasonJoel
I assume that these very same issues will delay "matter" as well.
Is that your assumption as well?

1 Like

Probably, yes.

How will it stack up vs the LoRaWAN stuff I wonder..

Should be somewhat close in range as they are very similar in transmit power, sensitivity, and radio type.

But LR should be a lot more consumer friendly to implement and support. LoRaWAN isn't rocket science, but the implementation is a lot more work in most cases.

So in a perfect world, it should have most of the range and battery benefits of LoRa, with the ease of implementation, well defined command classes, and easy driver/device creation of zwave.

1 Like

I would not be at all surprised if they view LR as their "market response" to Matter - and hold off on announcing it, and implementing it until the Matter consortium announces their products. It's a "one upsmanship" game, with customers caught in the middle.

Funny thing is .. It’s been ready.. Just waiting on device manufacturers to adopt it.

1 Like

Do you think that device manufacturers are holding off because of the "fear uncertainty and doubt (fud)" from forthcoming Matter announcements?

No idea really.. They way it's implemented in the specification makes it a no risk deal.. The device can either include into a LR network or a typical classic mesh.. I really have no idea why these companies are waiting..

If anything, if they were serious about LR, you would think that they would want to get to market and establish market presence before Matter is released. Given that the openthread / zigbee physical layer and backing infrastructure is already silently creeping into homes (I have border routers in my Apple TVs and my google hubs will have it with an eventual firmware update, and these border routers are just waiting for openthread devices ), it seems zwave manufacturers are not in a position where they should wait if they want to move forward.

A more pessimistic view is that the market, and even Silicon Labs, isn't seeing a long-term future for Z-Wave LR. The indicator of how Silicon Labs views both LR and "regular" Z-Waves future is that the market is 3 years from when the 700 series was first announced and the Z-Wave SDK still creates "ghost nodes" which can't easily be removed without a procedure involving a secondary controller and silicon labs Z-wave tools - definitely not consumer friendly. Silicon Labs would have fixed these problems long ago if they thought the Zwave product line was strategic to their future.

I'm personally sticking with Zwave for now, but if Openthread / Matter delivers on its promise of a protocol that can talk to Google Home, Alexa, Apple iOS and builds on zigbee), zwave becomes the next X10.

That many devices and larger mesh think.we are going to.need quite a bump in memory and CPU.power in the hub.

I've recently done some beta testing for a new 700 series device from very large manufacturer . The new device firmware does not support LR. When I asked, the response I received regarding LR was that they had not yet decided to support it.

I honestly don't believe that there is much motivation for larger companies to add LR support to existing products. Adding LR support to an existing devices involves significant costs. Development, QA (lots), documentation changes, support training, inventory management changes, etc. It's a lot of spend. Call it at around $1M. To make this investment worthwhile, there would need to be a resulting increase (or lack of decrease) in sales to offset the cost. They cannot effectively charge for the firmware upgrade, so they would need to count on a delta in sales of new devices to recoup the million dollar investment. Z-Wave isn't exactly known as a growth market.

Thread is a different story entirely. New Thead devices, based on the existing device "chassis" represents a similar spend. Call it around $1.5M. Yes, it will still take a lot of devices to recoup the investment. However, it's a new market, and the opportunity is perceived to be very large in comparison. All new device sales. Lots of opportunity, and lots of potential partnerships. A market that vendors don't want to be left out of. If it were my spend, this is where I would make my investment.

1 Like

Hello. When will zwave LR be supported?

My guess is when there are devices to test it with other than the dev kit.

2 Likes

Exactly .. The code has been tested with the dev kit but the specifications were still in flux.. There are still a few unanswered questions on how device manufacturers will do things in the real world..

5 Likes

Thanks, I really hope LR works a lot better than zwave mesh. Not a fan of the mesh concept, too much troubleshooting.

Have you seen the thread linked below? More than 80% of my z-wave devices are now directly paired to the controller (in effect, behaving like a non-mesh z-wave network). I used to think my z-wave mesh was pretty reliable, but it has been way faster and more responsive since this modification, even though the bulk of my devices are still z-wave and not z-wave+.

1 Like

We are getting closer to actually getting devices...

1 Like