Z-Wave Alliance Announces the Availability of Z-Wave Long Range Specification

By CIOReview | Monday, January 4, 2021

The Z-Wave Alliance announces the availability of Z-Wave Long Range specifications for product development.

FREMONT, CA: The Z-Wave Alliance announces the Z-Wave Long Range specification is available for product development. Z-Wave LR connectivity allows new IoT applications beyond the home, without any requirement for repeaters, ensuring seamless installation and low cost. With a network size of up to 4000 nodes, Z-Wave LR offers the scalability needed in MDU & hospitality implementations. Z-Wave LR also mitigates ongoing maintenance costs with up to 10 years of life on a coin cell battery.

The Z-Wave LR specification helps distances of up to many miles with a maximum output power of 30dBm while helping up to 4000 nodes on a single network. This shows a 20x increase over Z-Wave mesh node help while co-existing on the same network as Z-Wave mesh. Z-Wave LR is backward compatible and maintains interoperability with all Z-Wave certified devices.

The first deployment of Z-Wave LR, by Alliance member Silicon Labs, has already directly lined the sight transmission range of 1 mile (1.6 km) utilizing +14dBm output power. With a foreseeable transmission range of several miles, the Z-Wave LR specification expands the options of system scalability beyond the confines of a single residential property. Z-Wave LR extends Z-Wave potentials to larger, more complex implementations and markets, including hospitality, smart cities, MDU, commercial installations, large residential compounds, and more.

The Z-Wave Alliance Technical Workgroup has been working on fine-tuning the Z-Wave LR specification for implementation. These significant improvements position the Alliance to solidify Z-Wave as the de facto standard for IoT offerings where sub-GHz is mission-critical to devise performance. As IoT technology has expanded beyond the home walls and to the sidewalk, to commercial buildings, smart cities, and beyond, the firm decided to help these evolving industry needs. Implementing Z-Wave and Z-Wave LR into IoT networks maximizes value and reduces costs while offering more breadth of choice.

Z-Wave LR is now available from Silicon Labs on their Z-Wave 700 platform, and the specification is now available to Z-Wave Alliance members for development. The Z-Wave Alliance certification program will comprise Z-Wave LR by March 2021, anticipating several Z-Wave LR powered devices to launch throughout the year.