Take off every 'zig'... for great justice! ZigBee is a promising entry into the field of personal area networks (PAN) -- the technology that will soon enable low data rate two-way wireless connectivity for everything in your house (e.g. keyboard, thermostat). For those keeping score, it's exactly '4.4' sweeter than Wi-Fi (ZigBee is aligning with the IEEE802.15.4 standard) and is designed to live up to two years on battery power (unlike Bluetooth, it's 802.15 brother currently fighting with deployment issues). The protocol supports authentication and public-key encryption, so no "All your toaster are belong to us" or (gasp!) wartoasting.
posted by eddydamascene on Oct 25, 2002 - 11 comments