What CHIP Says about the Future of Smart Home

In late December 2019, Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance announced the Connected Home over Internet Protocol (CHIP) project. The project established a new working group to develop a new application layer smart home specification. The project, organized within the Zigbee Alliance, also brings engagement from a host of ZigBee Alliance board member companies including IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian. In a market long shackled by an inability to widely adopt broad standardization, the announcement offers significant potential, primarily from the commitment from heavyweights in the smart home market.

In addition, the timing of the CHIP announcement, just ahead of CES 2020, ensured that it would be a topic of debate among attending executives. Predictably, questions were raised about the project’s likelihood of success, or of meeting an aggressive timeline, but the consensus was that the heft of the companies behind the agreement signaled significant intent. The announcement also pushed the Z-Wave Alliance to announce its plan to open the specification to silicon vendors other than Silicon Labs—which who acquired the technology last year—the day after the CHIP announcement and instead of at CES itself.

It is worth examining the working group’s plans in more details as well as the potential impact for the smart home landscape.

The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for smart home Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and increase inter-OEM device compatibility for consumers. By building upon IP, the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for smart home device certification.

The resulting specification looks set to offer relatively radio-neutral (Wi-Fi, 802.15.4, and Bluetooth will all be supported), all IP communication layer specification comprising pre-defined schemas for types of smart home devices. The standardized schema will ensure that smart home platforms will be able to integrate and manage the functionality of each smart home device type—i.e., say video camera or smart thermostat—regardless of device vendor.

Given the group’s key founders and the success of voice control in driving smart home adoption, a primary goal is creating a way for voice control front end devices and their supporting platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others, to manage smart home devices locally as well as via cloud Appication Programming Interface (API).

The CHIP specification will be developed under the Zigbee Alliance and is expected to lean heavily on ZigBee device classification work that is already available. At the same time, Thread, which was first aligned with the ZigBee Alliance’s efforts back in 2015, was always focused on supporting IP communications to the device and not just to the smart home gateway.

The attention that CHIP has drawn is driven less by its aims than it is by the market reach and smart home clout of those committed to support it. CHIP is far from the first industry group looking to ameliorate the impact of competing radio protocols and smart home application level device definitions. The Open Connectivity Foundation, for example, has been developing is approach since 2014. However, bringing together major competing Consumer Electronics (CE) players and mass market smart home protagonists Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung, sets CHIP apart. In addition, the inclusion of home consumer companies highlights the potential to further draw in partners with the millions of products that can be brought into the smart home space

Those already working on the project note that it’s not only the size of the companies included in the project that suggest enough momentum for the project to succeed but also the scale of commitment. Major proponents immediately committed fulltime staff to the project. A rough draft from the working group is expected in late 2020.

The project, if successful, should lessen the complexity for consumer goods companies and their technology partners to deliver smart home products that operate with as wide an install base as possible. For many years now, OEMs have been pushed to determine smart home strategies, built on which integrations must be supported and which protocols play to which potential install bases. For example, at the radio level there is Z-Wave to integrate with monitored security offerings and ZigBee for the cable company providers. Above the wireless protocol level, integrations for various smart home platforms had to be developed and supported for each smart home platform provider. While that impacted dedicated smart home OEMs, it also raised barriers for broader, less technical consumer goods companies to invest in smart home products.

Project supporters, such as Comcast, believe that the ZigBee 802.15.4 Integrated Circuits (ICs) that have been embedded in their routers for the past year or more will be Over-the-Air (OTA) upgradeable to planned CHIP specification as the company had ensured significant memory onboard the modules to manage the higher demands of IP support.

However, it is likely that OEMs may also face greater price pressure on their smart home devices. Standardized device functionality brings less ability for OEMs to differentiate on the functionality of their offerings. Currently, additional features have been available to some end users within the OEMs’ own smart home platforms (typically in a branded smartphone app) or through rich integrations with smart home platforms. A move to standardization also means handing over more and more control to the major platform players behind the project.

For those platform players, like Amazon, Google, Apple, and others invested in managing smart home installations, the project aims to not only help more homes into the smart home realm but also enable these platform providers to practically support a wider range and richness of smart home applications and services. In short, delivering standardization at the device application level has the potential to deliver to smart home what HTML brought to browsers enabling online content accessibility.

It is that wider access for investment that is behind this project. With an industry focused on which protocols and application layer definitions, the potential is there for a standardized approach that brings more devices to the smart home, collects more data, and extracts greater value from that data. For the platform players it means greater value from their collection of smart home data but less ability to lock in a user base either by devices available or devices already deployed within homes. That should mean greater competition between voice control platforms. However, the project scope targets standardizing connectivity to the platform, not between platforms themselves.

TA successful CHIP specification should certainly help drive greater activity and adoption for the smart home market, not least by reducing the complexity consumers face in ensuring that each smart home device purchase will integrate with their existing investments and/or the smartphone or other smart home platform they wish to leverage.

There are, of course, a range of issues that could impact or delay the delivery of an agreed specification. With such large players engaged, keeping the project on track will not be straightforward. However, there is significant potential for the key players to benefit significantly from making the smart home a less complicated market for both OEMs and consumers. OEMs also have the potential to benefit from a faster growing, more widely adopted smart home market, especially as connected offerings still command a significant premium over similar non-connected offerings. Ultimately, if successful, CHIP has the potential to help shift the smart home market away from a focus on enabling systems to integrate disparate devices into a system to building broad and far-reaching apps that can leverage those connected systems to deliver new applications at scale.