ZigBee: The New Global Standard for Home Automation
Yesterday ZigBee Alliance announced a free public availability of “the ZigBee Home Automation (HA) public application profile that offers manufacturers a standards-based approach to introducing new wireless home automation products globally, eliminating the need for proprietary technology”. ZigBee is gonna to be a good competitor to Z-Wave. Both use “a standards-based technology with world-wide approval”, have reliable and flexible network topology and offer elegant devices.
ZigBee is used in the commercial home automation systems Control4 and Colorado vNet. Spanish on-line shop offers many ZigBee based devices approved for Europe. LinuxMCE currently supports only Z-Wave but people from Malaysia started to request of support ZigBee as well. Because Z-Wave frequency is not allowed there. So, I hope that LinuxMCE will support ZigBee in the nearest future.