The wise and wonderful Smart Home wizard Paul Hibbert has declared all Smart Home hubs are dead along with Z-Wave.
Why? Because heās an Amazon fan boy?
Because he thinks Amazon routines are better than a proper logic engine?
Because WiFi devices are clearly so much better than a low frequency low power mesh network?
Because Ooh the CHOIPā¦
Who knows whyā¦
What do you say?
Its not even borne yet!!!
weāll show the world what a hub is and what it does!
the notion of an instruction to turn the light on going via the cloud is NOT a viable proposition not today, not next 20 years! Even after 20 years when we have an infrastructure to support cloud commands properly, efficiency dictates that those instructions should be executed locally. Yep a local hub.
I am working as hard as I can ā¦next couple of years you will see a whole new āPlatformā unfoldā¦
They usually have 3 lights, turn them on via voice and pretends it to be home automation, while itās only home control. I have all local except my 3 nest thermostats. While I love their design, they sucks because the cloud is slow and theyāre frequently offline.
The guy is talking bollocks and doesnāt know what he is talking about.
Unfortunately he has some sway with newbies and less experienced users.
Heās funny and entertaining and I normally like his videos, but this one has pissed me off.
Itās all over the net now, they are talking about this video on the UK Home Automation group on Facebook.
Here was my reply to that topic on the Facebook group.
"Total bollocks I say.
Amazon fan boy. Amazon Routines wonāt ever replace a proper logic engine on a decent Z-Wave / Zigbee hub.
Z-Wave is by far the best protocol, low frequency, low power mesh wireless network.
The new Z-Wave 700 series is bringing ranges of several miles with 1000s of nodes on the network and battery life of 10 years on battery powered sensors and devices.
Letās see Zigbee, WiFi or CHOIP do that.
Like Iām gonna go out and buy an Amazon gen 4 Echo as my āhubā yes hub.
Smart Home hubs are dead apparently apart from said Amazon product.
I normally like Paulās videos but heās talking shite on this one. "
there are multiple issues hereā¦
which RF protocolā¦
Local computer for execution (hub)
doesnāt matter what kind of RF one uses, Zwave, zigbee, ble, wifi etcā¦the notion of āNot having a hubā locally is crazy cos cloud is āNOTā reliable. Even if it is reliable (I donāt see this in the short to mid term), its not efficient. As an architect if one has the choice to execute commands locally vs cloud, why would you choose cloud over local?
Your preaching to the choir, we all know already.
But videos like this sway new users and beginners down the wrong path and give them bad and incorrect information about protocols.
Yes voice assistants are a gateway drug into the modern world of āHome Automationā but its been the case to date, when they get serious they soon learn that an Amazon Echo or Google Home and cloud connected services isnāt going to cut it, so they look for a proper hub.
But as experts who have been in to Home Automation well before voice assistants even existed, what can we do to combat these trends.
Voice assistants are nothing but a keyboard that you speak toā¦
just like keyboard translates your keystrokes into electronic data, all these Voice assistants do, like a keyboard, is to turn your voice commands into electronic dataā¦they are NOT a hub, but a glorified keyboard!
I know I agree. But do the masses know and understand that is the worry
No they donāt, which means they will learn the hard way.
Amazon and Google have too much power.
Samsung looks like they are pulling out of the Smart Home hardware market. Aeotec have taken over their hardware production and are now manufacturing the Smartthings hub instead.
CHOIP worries me as well as Wifi HA devices in general.
Donāt Silicon Labs own both Z-Wave and Zigbee now anyway?
Yep they do.
It really doesnāt matter what RF and who provides itā¦there is a need for a hub locally
Haha heās deleted my comment off his YouTube video.
Seems Iām blocked just posted a comment again about Silicon Labs and itās instantly vanished.
at some level I agree with himā¦lack of innovation on hubs have allowed even a primitive thing like a glorified keyboard (voice assistants) to pretend they can do home automationā¦Only if there was a proper platform, the difference between a proper platform and these glorified keyboards would be like day and night.
I hate voice assistants.
I had Amazon Echos initially and then switched to Google Home speakers and Chromecast video and Chromecast Audio devices all round the house, only because I could upload my very large music collection to Google Play Music for free and voice command itās playback.
Now Google have screwed all that up with YouTube Music and killed off Play music and now I canāt even properly voice control my own music playback for tracks and albums I own, that I have uploaded to YouTube music.
So whatās the point?
They donāt understand your voice commands more than half the time anyway and the old Vera Google Home service and Alexa skill is basic now to say the least and has lacking functionality.
Mist computing is here to stayā¦
Heās addressing someone who is still happily using X10, a technology that is now entering its 46th year and still works perfectly well with all the latest offerings.
I reckon this dude will be in a hole in the ground long before X10 makes itās exit.
Donāt know about lockdown but this guy
needs to be locked up, securely if possible 
X10 guys are the proper OG 
Well, my take on this.
For entry level home automation i do not see a bright future for zwave or zigbee. With Wifi-6 and low power Wifi coming that will be the first entry for many in the not so far future. You will need a local hub, but my FritzBox DSL modem already provides that for the basic stuff for free. For now with limited device support, but that will probably change. I could use that. The Philips Hue and others have something that does lights in very nice ways that fits the bill for most people for years to come. The most important will be that it just works out of the box. If you need to pair anything, it is a simple press of a single button. Then you ācontrolā your castle from your phone, wow.
For us, the real home-automaters ( 
) I think zwave plus zigbee (because of Hue IMO) is for now the best and will be for a long time. But not many people are willing to spend a lot of time building up the network of devices, especially with all the hassle it still is. Also in many countries you are not allowed to install or even touch some the build-in devices we use, and you donāt want to have to call an installer each time your hub lost the zwave connection to the light switch. I hope SmartStart and LR will change that, but the devices supporting it are still too limited to make a difference.
Then the cloud stuff. That is for industrial IoT, especially Edge and Mist as that will be services you have to buy from a (Telco) service provider. It is very important in that business, but it will typically use low power long range 4G or 5G for connectivity, or sometimes WiFi-6. The Edge compute is used to keep the IoT devices as dumb as possible to minimize power usage, keep the remote attack surface as small as possible and make them a no-brainer to deploy, manage and replace remotely. With Edge, you do data pre-processing close to the devices (the idea is at or close to the 4/5G base station) and so reduce the amounts of data you need to send to the central cloud and can respond to events in the Edge deployed software reducing response times to milli-second levels. With 5G large companies have even bought their own spectrum and are running a private 5G network in their factories with all robots, tools etc. communicating in real time. They do this because WiFi is too slow, unreliable and too hard to manage.
But back to they video, it should be flagged as fake news 
Cheers Rene
Wow, I didnāt even know someone had sat around long enough to name compute models after weather conditions - can you imagine the brain-storming session. This is what resonated the best with me:
Communication takes 5x the power of computing in an embedded microcontroller, so, by collecting raw data at the edge of your network, then grouping it using filtering, anomaly identification mechanisms, and pattern recognition, you are able to send only essential data up to the gateway, router, or server, which in turn, conserves battery power as well as bandwidth.
My last company, we developed an embedded agent for cellular devices and networks that did precisely this! The objective was, with privacy at the forefront, detect non-normative device, network or service operation through local event capture, filter, reporting married with cloud computing for post-mortem root-cause analysis. So for example, if the device drops a call, roll back 5 seconds, collect the signal characteristics leading up to the drop, the towers in proximity, etc. and upload to the cloud the minimum needed for big-data root-cause-analysis. The agent was full-Turing capable meaning you could vend a set of triggers and filtering instructions to the device to tailor it to the problem - (e.g. new cellular network technology rollout, new device rollout, etc). We originally did this out of need because circa 2005, we only had 1xRTT cellular flip phones 
Was boon with all the major device manufacturers and network operators. Ultimately sold it to AT&T.
However, I must be old because I I used to describe it to customers as cloud computing where all the devices comprise the cloud. It makes me chuckle when the things that were done long ago out of ordinary need circa 2005 are later tagged with a new word to make hyping easier. Almost like Xerox (for copying) and Google (for searching). But I digress.
Good read @melih - thanks for sharing the article!
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