Thread Group, Open Connectivity Foundation Partner on IoT Effort

The Thread Group and the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) said Wednesday they'll work together to advance adoption of connected home products. To help the IoT realize its full potential, players including silicon, software, platform and finished-good providers have to work together to ensure OCF's application layer will be fully compatible with Thread's IPv6-based wireless mesh network layer, said the alliances in a news release. "Thread Group members identified and prioritized OCF as a strategically important application layer to run over the Thread wireless mesh network," said Thread Group President Grant Erickson. For consumers to put their faith in the connected home, their experiences must be "simple, reliable, and effortless,” said Erickson. The agreement is a step toward ensuring smart home devices work together out of the box, “regardless of their brand or function," he said. The Thread Group focuses on the networking layer and OCF sits at the application layer, but both support low-power technologies at the center of their approaches to the connected home, they said. Both technologies were designed to scale from the internet of small things to the internet of larger things, which they said is an “easier task than scaling down.” The groups are committed to providing a seamless product experience and a connected home framework that’s easy to use from setup and configuration through interaction at the application layer, they said.