The smart home company Insteon has vanished. The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users’ cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, “All Services Online.” The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.
Insteon is (or, more likely, “was”) a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon’s propriety networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee.
A proprietary protocol can often mean your device is a useless paperweight if the company which owns it goes bust. Open standards like MQTT however mean other support exists to continue using your devices, for example, on Home Assistant and other open smart home services. More and more we are seeing companies close down, leaving consumers stranded, so it is imperative to instead choose to buy products which support open standards.
See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/shameful-insteon-looks-dead-just-like-its-users-smart-homes/
#technology #openstandards #smarthome #MQTT #IoT