There are various technologies which are being offered by companies right from proprietary ones to commercially open technologies. Some of the prevalent open technologies apart from Bluetooth Smart are Wifi & ZigBee and even Wired IP technology. All of the technologies have their own benefits and shortcomings. We believe the best technology suitable for Home/Office/Building Automation is Bluetooth Smart.

Bluetooth Smart or BLE or Bluetooth 4.x is different from the traditional Bluetooth or Bluetooth 2.x

The two main differences are:
Ability to address millions of devices compared to Bluetooth 2.x which could only dress upto 7.
Minimal Energy requirement compared to traditional bluetooth 2.x which makes makes it very attractive as it can be deployed on battery as well which traditional Bluetooth couldn't be.

We believe that based on the todays technology offering Bluetooth Smart is the best suited for such automation applications.

Below is the comparison of various technologies used in the automation. The wired technologies are not included in the comparison due to heavy cost of installation. Similarly IR is not used in the comparison as it needs line of sight for operation and hence is compromised in functionality.

* Although Bluetooth SIG has not come out with mesh network framework specification but there are few manufacturers already supporting it.

As you can see in the chart above BLE is the only technology in the space which is not only supported on your mobile but can also run on battery and can create a mesh network. It is easiest to deploy and has low maintenance cost. The only major disadvantage is that it cannot be used for Video traffic where Wifi scores above it.

Zigbee is not supported by mobile set providers and hence needs a Wifi-Zigbee bridge to move traffic to/fro from Zigbee network where as Wifi cant be run of a battery and doesn't support mesh and hence is less extensible.

Hence all in all BLE is the most suitable technology for Home Automation.