One of the most sought goals nowadays when it comes to home automation is (or it should be) to find consistent ways to communicate with as many devices as possible using the same tool, the same box and the same interface.
Moreover, many hubs can usually talk only to their smartphone app, adding an app hell to the bridge hell. In order to solve the problem, many companies are throwing on the market even more hubs and bridges (from Samsung SmartThings, to the plethora of Amazon Echo, Google and Apple devices etc.), often compatible only with a subset of the devices out there and incompatible with one another, often incompatible by design with devices produced by competitors: that only brings even more fragmentation to the current smart home hell. Try to imagine an alternative reality where all the ethernet cards can send and receive TCP/IP packets, but you’ll need an adapter just for HTTP traffic, one for FTP, one for SMTP, and so on: that’s more or less the reality today when it comes to smart bridges and hubs. What’s ironic is that most of these devices actually speak the same protocol (either Zigbee or Z-Wave) but, in most of the cases, they can only control their own devices. Philips Hue lights come with their own bridge, same for Lutron, same for HomeKit, same for Belkin, same for Switchbot, and the list goes on. The bad thing is that you’ll probably need a different bridge or hub for each class of devices you want to use. These protocols solve some of the issues of Wi-Fi when it comes to smart devices - like latency, centralised topology and relatively high power requirements - but they do require some physical hardware in between to do the smart protocol Wi-Fi translation and make the devices actually controllable from a Wi-Fi-connected client. Unless you buy a smart device that communicates directly over Wi-Fi (like a TP-Link or Belkin smart plug), odds are that many of your favourite smart devices use either Bluetooth, Zigbee or Z-Wave to communicate. But in order to succeed in its task, it often requires you to fill your house with bridges that can connect your smart devices to your Wi-Fi network. Home automation comes with plenty of potential to make our lives easier.
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