Not long ago, relevant departments jointly issued the "Notice on Several Measures to Promote Home Consumption," which specifically proposed to promote the interconnection of smart home devices, establish and improve a standard system, promote the development of single-product intelligence to whole-house intelligence, and carry out pilot projects for digital home construction.
For business reasons or to ensure a consistent experience, almost all smart home brands adopt a "fight on their own" approach. Their respective ecosystems are closed and non-interoperable, making device interconnection and interoperability a long-standing pain point in the smart home field. To a certain extent, it has hindered the healthy long-term development of the smart home industry.
For this reason, the entire industry has been exploring corresponding solutions. By building a unified application layer "language", the Matter protocol that shields ecological barriers came into being. As a participant-level member of Matter and the world's leading overall IoT solution provider, Quectel recently officially launched a one-stop Matter solution to empower the smart home industry to accelerate integrated development and accelerate the arrival of the era of "all things connected" .
Pain point: Smart homes are not that “smart”
At the "Blooming Beauty of Communications - Matter Solution Introduction Online Seminar" recently held by Quectel, Quectel product manager Ding Ziwen said that although global consumption is currently sluggish and demand is weak, the smart home market is still showing steady growth. , can be called a blue ocean.
Ding Ziwen pointed out that although smart home is not a very new industry, after years of development, technology and ecology have been continuously upgraded, and market demand has continued to be released. The smart home industry has once again formed a situation where a hundred flowers are blooming through innovative competition. "Especially in 2016, the emergence of smart speakers, a new voice-controlled interaction method, further detonated the entire smart home market, which has grown tenfold so far."
However, it is not difficult to find that in the process of rapid expansion of the smart home industry, a series of different platforms and ecosystems have been formed, and all of them are closed without exception. In addition, because the protocols adopted by each manufacturer and device will also be different, This is how "ecological islands" appear.
To give a simple example, for ordinary users, if they want to build a whole-house smart device, they can only use equipment of the same brand. However, it is conceivable that it is difficult to create a desired solution with limited choices; and if you want to experience For smart home products of different brands, you will find that there are endless APPs to install, resulting in poor user experience and violating the concept of "smartness".
"Devices cannot be interconnected within different ecosystems, which has varying degrees of impact on consumers, developers, and producers, thereby restricting the development of the entire industry." Ding Ziwen introduced that for this reason, connection standards The Alliance (CSA) launched the Matter protocol to eliminate compatibility concerns between different protocols and different ecosystems and solve the problem of fragmentation in the smart home field.
Consensus: Matter Protocol breaks ecological islands
The Matter protocol is an open and universally applicable standard protocol that provides a unified interoperability framework for smart home devices and enables interconnection across devices, ecosystems and brands. This is the core of solving the main contradictions in the current development process of smart homes. capabilities, while Matter also has features such as reliability and security.
Theoretically, users do not need to worry about platform adaptation issues after purchasing any smart home device that supports Matter. These devices can run on any platform and support free switching, which will completely eliminate the need to install a large number of adaptations on the device. The need to install APP is completely away from the trouble of "endless APP installation". In addition, Matter also supports consistent and low-latency local connections, and can respond to user commands in a timely manner regardless of whether the device is sleeping.
As for the most important security, Matter Protocol has already considered it clearly. Matter devices must be authenticated before accessing the network, and all transmitted data must be encrypted. It ensures that while simplifying user control and operations, it can still maintain high security and avoid problems such as user information being leaked.
Quectel, as one of Matter's major global partners, has created a one-stop Matter solution based on its accumulated achievements and experience in many aspects.
“The reason why Quectel provides a one-stop Matter solution is that on the one hand, Quectel hopes to facilitate the interconnection between devices for consumers, and on the other hand, it allows developers to develop devices at a lower cost and focus their energy. Focus more on the product itself, rather than the choice of ecology or protocol." Ding Ziwen emphasized.
After getting rid of the constraints of "ecological islands", forecast data shows that by 2030, global shipments of smart home devices will exceed 1.9 billion units, of which Matter will account for more than 95%. It can be said that the emergence of the Matter protocol will bring vigorous development prospects to the future smart home market.
Solution: A true one-stop service
How do you understand "one-stop shop"?
Ding Ziwen introduced that Quectel Communications is committed to providing full-process solutions from hardware access to software applications to accelerate the intelligent upgrade of equipment. On this basis, in order to help customers solve the problem of high certification fees, Quectel also provides a number of certification transfer services. In addition, Matter equipment must be configured through a QR code or a short code to ensure the uniqueness of the "identity" of a single device. Therefore, the manufacturer's production line-related transformation services are also extremely demanding.
The key to hardware access capabilities lies in the module, which is also the cornerstone of the entire solution. Matter certified devices use short-distance communication protocols represented by WiFi as the network layer. According to Quectel Communications Product Manager Fu Kehan, Quectel, as an important part of the Internet of Things industry, serves the foundation of thousands of industries in the traditional cellular field. In recent years, a large amount of R&D resources have been invested in short-distance communications, aiming to help customers solve the last 100 meters of the Internet of Things. This time, multiple WiFi modules for the Matter protocol were developed on this basis.
At present, Quectel has launched multiple series of Matter modules including FC41D, FCM100D, FLM040D, FLM140D, FLM240D, FLM340D, etc., which are widely used in light sources of lighting scenes, filament lamp driving power supplies, light strips/light strings and other atmosphere products, and lighting fixtures. products, as well as plug strips, dimmer switches, circuit breakers and other products for electrician scenes. Ding Ziwen said that the rich product matrix allows customers to have more flexible choices in hardware for their products.
Since you are connected to the Matter ecosystem, the certification process is essential. "We all know that it is very expensive to get Matter certification for a product." Ding Ziwen said that there are currently five methods of Matter certification on the market: new certification, similarity certification, same series certification, transfer certification and re-certification. Among them, transfer certification It means embedding certified products into new products of other companies, which can reduce certification fees by about 80%. Currently, Quectel has obtained certifications for all categories in the lighting and electrical fields, which means that it can help customers in need provide Such services.
For production line transformation, Quectel's host computer links the laser engraving machine/printer and shielding cover to obtain QR code data from the Quectel software platform to ensure the uniqueness of the laser engraving code. Quectel currently provides customizable host computers and OpenAPI, allowing users to develop and produce host computers by themselves. In addition to providing host computers, Quectel can also assist in one-stop production line transformation and upgrades.
It can be seen that through modules, transfer certification, and even how to help production and other capabilities, Quectel provides one-stop services for the entire industry chain, all to help partners achieve lower costs and faster By connecting products to the Matter ecosystem, we can quickly realize products from functional definition to release and mass production, and share the new blue ocean of smart homes.
(Article source: C114 Communication Network)