Every January, mighty crowds of electronics and IT professionals descend on Las-Vegas, Nevada to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show. CES 2016 has just wrapped up, and it turned out to be the largest yet: 160,000 attendees, 3,800 exhibitors, and nearly 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space.

One trend that continued into this year’s record-breaking CES was the increased competition in the home automation space. Companies large and small offer their visions of your automated dwelling, and these visions look increasingly promising… yet the mass adoption of smart home systems and products remain elusive and patchy at best.

One of the major obstacles to the widespread adoption of smart home systems is the painfully obvious lack of the dominant communications/interoperability standard. There is a dizzying array of established and new protocols, radio standards, consortiums and work groups. On top of this, large industry players – Apple, LG, Samsung and many others – are offering their own smart home solutions. The war is on, and no clear winner has emerged so far. This leads to market fragmentation and confusion among prospective buyers.

Recently, there are some attempts to bring disparate standards closer together. For example, Open Interconnect Consortium and AllSeen Alliance are hard at work trying to make billions of smart home devices interoperable. Still, many vendors are making forceful attempts to sway things their way.

Another obstacle is the complexity of related standards. Most specifications run entire thick books that are just unassailable for anyone but the most dedicated of “students”. As a result, some vendors resort to partial adoption of existing standards.

For example, when the ZigBee protocol was announced, many equipment manufacturers quickly adopted its radio, i.e. the hardware portion of the standard, but not the communications protocol itself. It wasn’t until one dedicated startup called Ember went through the effort of creating true ZigBee modules (supporting mesh networking, etc.) that most vendors even considered incorporating this standard into their wares. To spare its customers the pain of dealing with a complex stack one chip vendor – Microchip – even created their own alternative communications protocol called MiWi. It relies on the same radio (IEEE 802.15.4) and is billed to be the “lightweight protocol”. The term “lightweight” here is the apparent comparison to the “heaviness” of the original specification.