SMART HOME: SYSTEMS EXPLAINED

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

- ALEX COX

Connectivity divides us, drawing a line between those things which can talk to each other and those things which simply don’t know — or 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 just 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 makes 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.

The problem is, smart home rules are 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 into it even if they know what to say. This is no coincidence — it’s often deliberate.