ZigBee Who?

One of the premises of open spectrum is that if you create a wireless commons, a thousand electromagnetic flowers will bloom. WiFi and Bluetooth are two of the better-known blossoms, but another seems to be ZigBee.

The ZigBee Alliance - "an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard" - puts it like this:

The goal of the ZigBee Alliance is to provide the consumer with ultimate flexibility, mobility, and ease of use by building wireless intelligence and capabilities into everyday devices. ZigBee technology will be embedded in a wide range of products and applications across consumer, commercial, industrial and government markets worldwide. For the first time, companies will have a standards-based wireless platform optimized for the unique needs of remote monitoring and control applications, including simplicity, reliability, low-cost and low-power.

The ZigBee Alliance site has buckets of useful links - as well as some mild untruths. For example, the FAQ claims that the name comes from the following fact:

The domestic honeybee, a colonial insect, lives in a hive that contains a queen, a few male drones, and thousands of worker bees. The survival, success, and future of the colony is dependent upon continuous communication of vital information between every member of the colony. The technique that honey bees use to communicate new-found food sources to other members of the colony is referred to as the ZigBee Principle. Using this silent, but powerful communication system, whereby the bee dances in a zig-zag pattern, she is able to share information such as the location, distance, and direction of a newly discovered food source to her fellow colony members. Instinctively implementing the ZigBee Principle, bees around the world industriously sustain productive hives and foster future generations of colony members.

But as the ever-acute Rupert Goodwins explains:

I checked on a few apiary Web sites. I even emailed a Professor Of Bee Things at a big agricultural institute. Of the 'ZigBee Principle' there is no sign -- although I do note that pictures of bees were used to signal the aiming point in antique urinals. A very dry Victorian pun that: the Latin for bee is Apis.

We are therefore forced to conclude that the ZigBee Name FAQ has nothing to do with reality, but is merely a PR taking the bees. Let's hope the rest of the standard isn't just pith and wind.

Since I've only just come across the said factitious ZigBee, I've not yet found my bearings, and I can't quite tell to what extent all this stuff is truly open. But it does sound interesting - if not quite the bee's knees yet. (Via ARCchart and Openspectrum.info.)