Wireless world abuzz over arrival of ZigBee standard

The ZigBee Alliance announced late on Tuesday that the first ZigBee specification had been ratified. ZigBee is meant to offer short distance low-speed transmissions at very low power consumption which could be used to give network connections to almost any electronic device. That means countless possibilities for simple control and monitoring applications, such as this typical example; remote-controlled lighting in your house. Here are some specs from Yankee Group:

• Raw data throughput rates of 250 Kbps at 2.4 GHz, 40 Kbps at 915 MHz, and 20 Kbps at 868 MHz
• Ultra-low power consumption, ranging from several months to years
• Support for multiple network architectures, including star, mesh and cluster configurations
• Flexible range of 10 to 75 meters, depending on output power
• Small code footprint at 28 KB