Hi.
Suspect it is another flavor of wireless links to make life more complicated. Or is it another flavor of firmware to decode differently encrypted WiFi or Buetooth ? Does it use the same RF frequencies as Wifi ? Any dumb-proof explanation, please ? Examples are a bonus.
Can you use a plain smart phone to communicate - receive a Zigbee signal, or some application is needed to translate ?
The utility swapped my energy meter with a Zigbee thinghy, and my inverter also uses that.
If a Zigbee signal does not reach destination, do other devices with Zigbee become ´repeaters´ to convey the signal to success destination or am peeing out of the can ?

 

Zigbee is a set of IoT protocols that uses IEEE 802.15.4 radios —a standard for LR-PWAN (Low Rate Personal Wireless Area Network).

It uses particular hardware, though it shares the 2.4GHz band with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. 802.15.4 hardware is less expensive to implement than Bluetooth, and much less general than Wi-Fi.

Zigbee can operate as a mesh network or use explicit repeaters. Z-Wave, the previous reigning champ of home automation protocols uses Zigbee.

Matter, which is the current IoT Home Automation (HA) ascendant standard is related to Zigbee. Matter is a Google project that’s been embraced by most vendors now, even Apple. HomeKit uses Matter.

These protocols are very complex, but most of the time we are dealing with things on top of them not with the protocols themselves.

 

So Zigbee is mostly for home automation, and does not carry audio like Bluetooth?

 

So Zigbee is mostly for home automation, and does not carry audio like Bluetooth?

Note that there is also Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) which does not have an audio device profile.

 

Here I thought you guys were talking about the department store in the movie A Christmas Story. My bad.

 

Zigbee become ´repeaters´ to convey the signal to success destination

We use Zigbee to monitor oil wells. There is a high power version that reaches some distance. There is a 900mhz version that we use because 2.4ghz is not good outdoors.
I do not know all the different versions but what we used reaches line of sight outdoors. We got more distance by transmitting slower than WiFi and using the high power version and using a good antenna. For monitoring data, there is not much data and slow is just fine. There is a "mesh network" option that is really good. Any node can talk to any node in range. Data can hop from one node to the next, next, next until it reached the destination. We had installations as large as 10 miles long where the mesh network thing worked. Data might have to hop 10 time to get from one end to the other.
I do not know how the home automation Zigbee routers work.