Zigbee's Not Perfect?

A new report by ARC Advisory Group suggests that Zigbee is not perfect for industrial markets. It does suggest that Zigbee, or at least 802.15.4 (the IEEE standards basis of Zigbee's PHY and MAC) is the best standard out there for industrial appplications, but falls short of the ideal.

From the release:

"The report urges manufacturers to explore extensions beyond ZigBee for more RF agility, edge devices with higher network reliability, and other advanced services that benefit industrial devices and systems."

As usual, the customer wants its cake and wants to eat it too. Certainly a standards-based solution will provide a multitude of hapless semiconductor companies falling all over themselves to win business and allows for a multi-vendor strategy assuring low pricing (Chipcon's new CC2430 single chip Zigbee family is already priced as low as $3.30 in volume prior to any production shipments.) and assurance of supply.

But as the feature wagon loads up, the customer wants to maintain the overall Bill of Materials. This will not happen, or at least it never happens to me when I go to a restaurant and decide to order dessert after the bill has arrived; they always charge me for extras.