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Z-Wave Long Range and its mile-long capabilities will arrive next year - Ars Technica
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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No it is not! It's a standard, but is by no means an "open" one. Use of it requires paying royalties to the Zigbee Alliance.
Is it? I thought that ZigBee was royalty free and Zwave was not (even because usually ZigBee products costs less than the Zwave ones); is it the other way around?
I believe that Z-wave is more open then Zigbee (although it didn't start out that way, and it's unclear to me whether it's completely so now or not).
Thread exists because it's meant to be the royalty-free replacement for both of them (and the first royalty-free standard since X10).
I just had a look at some Z-Wave motion detection sensor and I soon remembered why I chose ZigBee some years ago: they're soooo expensive! ZigBee sensors costs half/a forth of the Z-Wave ones!
Why that? Maybe for the more expensive royalty? More expensive components?
Disclaimer: I am wildly speculating as someone who has been been paying attention to smart home tech for a long time, but only minimally so because every time I checked it seemed too immature/janky/proprietary/etc. to bother dealing with. (It's only recently, with the advent of stuff like Home Assistant, ESPHome, Tasmota, and hopefully-imminent Matter and Thread, that I've started to dip my toes in.)
First of all, I feel like a decade ago Z-Wave used to be the cheaper option. Second, my impression is that Z-wave, as an older standard with questionable compliance/implementation accuracy across vendors, just didn't work quite as well as Zigbee, which I guess would make it less popular over time and therefore eventually more expensive due to fewer economies of scale.