The Google Nest Hub Max smart display has now become the first-ever certified and publicly available device Built-on-Thread technology. According to a recent announcement by the Thread Group, Google achieved the feat after successfully passing the Group’s rigorous specification compliance and interoperability testing.
The Thread Group conducts tests against multiple vendor configurations to ensure that technology from different manufacturers can ultimately communicate, reliably and securely. The Nest Hub Max has proven its ability to do this, and joins the growing roster of Thread-certified solutions, which currently includes more than 20 components.
The Nest Hub Max smart home solution can connect to more than 30,000 smart devices from more than 3,500 vendors with the Google Assistant and the Smart Home and Local Home SDKs. Nest Hub Max's Thread support brings the Internet and the rest of the Google Nest home directly and securely to small, power-constrained devices without expensive, proprietary gateways. For example, as a Built-on-Thread certified device, Nest Hub Max can pair with the Nest x Yale Lock and can extend the range of either Nest Secure or Nest Connect. In the future, Nest Hub Max will be compatible with other Built on Thread certified products, regardless of their manufacturer.
Thread requires less power relative to comparable solutions, which improves the battery life of devices across its network. Its self-healing mesh network delivers a reliable and robust network that is complementary to WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which is critical to delivering on the promise of true IoT for consumers.
Regardless of the specific connectivity technologies used, Thread helps devices talk to different clouds, while simultaneously running multiple application layers, such as Dotdot, OCF or Weave. It does all of this without any additional hardware or software, which saves developers time and money, and promises the end user a lower cost, less power-hungry solution.
Thread’s future-proof technology means certified devices can easily migrate to the Thread 1.2 specification - announced in June 2019 - which improves the network’s energy efficiency, latency and node density. Thread 1.2 offers optional support for Bluetooth Low Energy devices, such as smartphones, and standardizes Thread out-of-band commissioning over Bluetooth, making it possible for devices with only a Bluetooth Low Energy radio to be a native part of a Thread mesh network.
Nest Hub Max's Built-on-Thread certification implementation is based on OpenThread, a Thread-certified open-source implementation of the Thread networking protocol, released by Google and adopted by a number of Thread-certified components.
