At CES 2024 (taking place 9-12 January in Las Vegas), the company Thirdreality will present their Smart Bridge MZ1, which acts as a bridge between Matter and Zigbee – as a matter of fact, the product is already available for purchase on Amazon.
With our innovative products and solutions, we hope to make a significant contribution to the smart home industry and provide users with greater convenience and a better experience,” says Xuezhang Dong, CEO of Thirdreality.
According to Thirdreality, the Smart Bridge MZ1 acts as a link between the Matter standard and the Zigbee protocol, allowing users to seamlessly connect and control their Zigbee devices from leading platforms within the Matter standard, such as Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant and SmartThings.
The point is that if you have Zigbee devices, they won’t work directly with Matter products, but if you use the Smart Bridge MZ1, they become Matter-compatible and can be controlled from the same platforms as Matter products. In other words, the bridge enables Zigbee users to migrate their devices to the Matter ecosystem.
At the time of writing, Thirdreality is not a major player in all markets, although its products are available through Amazon, but it is likely that similar products are in the pipeline from other players, allowing existing Zigbee devices to be implemented into current and future smart home platforms.
Products with similar functionality have been on the market for a while, including Aqara Hub M2, that can act as a link or bridge between Zigbee devices and Apple Homekit. Another example is Athom Homey Pro,
an advanced controller with extensive compatibility – and at a price that’s about 15 times higher than the Smart Bridge MZ1.
While smart home development has come a long way in recent years, it has been a source of frustration for many that it’s often difficult to get things to work together if you don’t want to settle for a more or less closed system.
The idea behind Matter is to make life much easier for both manufacturers and consumers by creating a common standard that allows different types of products from different brands – and different platforms – to communicate seamlessly with each other.
Matter
Matter is the name of a communication standard for smart home devices with the aim of creating a single common standard that can be used by a wide range of smart home products, regardless of manufacturer.
It began in 2019 as a collaboration between Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung and other brands in the smart home market, and in 2022, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) launched the Matter 1.0 specification – an open source platform that was supported from day one by more than 280 companies in the smart home segment.
In short, Matter is not a new communication protocol, but a level above other protocols, and the protocols that Matter uses today are Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Thread. In addition, Bluetooth Low Energy is used for device deployment.
Zigbee
Zigbee is an open standard for low-power and compact receivers and transmitters, and since its inception almost 20 years ago, more than one billion Zigbee circuits have been sold. Zigbee was originally aimed exclusively at businesses with different needs, and compatibility was poor.
However, close to 10 years ago, the Zigbee protocol was updated (to 3.0) and the profiles were standardised, which meant that compatibility between different companies’ products was significantly improved.
Zigbee is a widely used protocol that, like Wi-Fi, uses 2.4 GHz for things like lighting, alarms and thermostats.
The organisation behind Zigbee is The Connectivity Standards Alliance, the same organisation behind Matter.