The big issue is that your network provider is also the physical provider, and there’s no real competition as a result.

When most people got their Internet service over telephone lines, your ISP didn’t need to also own the telephone lines, they just needed some telephone numbers.

When the telcos themselves got into the business of providing internet access, they pushed out the competition.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act, written by a Republican Congress, and signed into law by a Democratic president (Clinton) is largely responsible for the current state of affairs.

The “Information Superhighway” is a toll road, built by taxes, but owned by private corporations.

What’s crazy is that the government paid these corporations to build this infrastructure.

When your government pays, say, a road building company to build roads, one doesn’t then grant the ownership of those roads to that company.

But that is EXACTLY what we did with our communications infrastructure.

If he doesn’t want it, I’ll take it! 🤣

Prebuilt is almost always the wrong answer. That holds true in way more fields than just technology as well.

The phrase “bought versus built” comes to mind.

You can almost always build exactly what you need for less money or headache than you think.

Will you maybe spend a little more than buying some cheap one-off? Possibly. However, the best part of building it yourself is that you’ll also typically know exactly what you’ve got, and if you use off-the-shelf parts, replacements and upgrades are easier in the long run.

TCO. Total Cost of Ownership.

+1 For hass.

The dominant failure mode of an SSD is to become read-only. There’s no data loss there…

If I’m in the bedroom, I may want my ceiling lights on if someone is in there if it’s dark outside, but if my wife and I are in bed, then only turn on the baseboard lights, at 1% brightness when someone is still in bed. Presence sensors aren’t that fine grained, and I certainly don’t want to wake up my wife when this old fart gets up to go pee again. She’s grumpy when awakened. 🤣

Correct. Unlike zigbee and zwave Matter does not define a single communication technique.

It can be used with thread, or over a standard tco TCP IP network.

Typically, Matter devices will support either thread or WiFi, but there’s no definite distinction to Matter itself.

If you also want to use Matter over Thread devices, you will need a thread dongle. The ZBT-1 can do either thread OR zigbee but not both at once.

In fact, the biggest issue I see with Matter is that there’s no real easy way to tell if the device uses WiFi or thread.

There are a lot of Matter devices out there now, but only a few use the Thread protocol.

My Matter (and Zigbee, and Z-Wave) hub is a laptop I paid 300.00 for almost 10 years ago, when I wanted something cheap for the semi truck.

I run Home Assistant on it now. I have both a $40 zwave USB stick, and a similarly priced Zigbee stick.

The software for the hub comes with HA. Just install the matter server

Their zbt-1 dongle can do either zigbee or thread, but matter does not technically need anything else. Thread does, but not Matter. Install Matter Server addon and you can use any matter WiFi device.