Smart home systems explained

Just what’s connecting your hardware together – and should you really care?

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Connectivity divides us, drawing a line between those things which can talk to each other and those things which simply don’t know – or even don’t want to know – what everything else is trying to say. It sums up the most frustrating part of the smart home landscape: you simply can’t link everything together.

But why? A networking protocol is, after all, technically independent of hardware. It’s simply the set of rules and procedures used to exchange data between devices. If both ends of the connection are equipped with the same set of rules, they speak the same language. Simple. In some areas we have settled on particular protocols which make sense: computer networking, for example, tends to lean on the Open Systems Interconnection, which comprises TCP/IP, HTTPS, DNS et al; this standardization is what make the internet possible. On top of this, we’ve generally settled on hardware for certain tasks. There aren’t multiple commercial wireless networking protocols fighting for your Mac’s attention, for example – we’re all be able to get online with some variant of 802.11.

Problem is, smart home rules are a lot more complicated than simply sending the right messages in the right format. If a smart home manufacturer decides to use a closed API, others won’t have access to relevant commands. If a manufacturer decides to use an unusual radio frequency, others won’t be able to lock in to it even if they know what to say. This is no coincidence – it’s often very deliberate.