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TheRegister mentions problems with the ZigBee alliance in “ZigBee in danger of falling apart.“. Vendors are selling “prestandard“ products like we've seen with IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g.
Electronics Weekly mentions manufacturers that simply ignore ZigBee because it's too complex and too late.
Then there is another problem : as you can see in my little chart none of the manufacturers have more than one device and none of the devices operates on both the 868 - 915 MHz range and the 2450 MHz range. This makes sense form a technical point of view but not for the end consumers. Even though all devices are labeled “ZigBee compliant”, some devices still won't work together. This is going to be pretty confusing for the consumers. My guess is that only 2450 MHz devices will actually be used on a large scale. Presetting a device for different markts is just to much trouble. Chipcon mentions this as well.
This article mentions one tradeoff though : 868 / 915 MHz devices will have a longer range and will have less interference from microwave ovens and WiFi equipment. Interference between these device is describe in an article here.
A zigbee news site is in the works.
posted on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 8:43 PM