ULE: do we need yet another home automation standard?

I have never expected another significant dose of grist to my mill when I've recently learned about the ULE Alliance standing behind the new ULE (Ultra-Low Energy) home automation standard. Why do we need yet another standard is not clear for me, but the ULE Alliance Members certainly have a different opinion. May be they thought they were too big to join other alliances and have formed their own?

There are technical reasons ULE may succeed. The #1 is the dedicated radio band. "The band is just of us, nobody will interfere" claim the Promoters and Contributors. "With ULE we have the range to cover an entire house without repeaters" say the engineers, which for sure is a benefit. Meshing and hopping networks are the nightmare of smart home implementations (they fail too often and they respond too slow).

But reading the Technical Specification document I see almost nothing about the application layer standard. Meaning there are no such things as ULE Light Bulb or ULE Wall Switch or ULE Thermostat, which simply translates to "no interoperability in ULE". ZigBee learned the lack of application layer interoperability the hard way. And now ULE repeats this error spending so much time talking about the transport layer and defining nothing in the application layer.

Looking at the "Global Home control and domotic scenario" in the above mentioned document, it feels like a time machine moving me backwards 10 or 20 years. Guess what? They are using the old style cordless phones (with numeric keypads!) to "view display & control"... and a pure grey-on-grey LCD displays I remember from 1980's Casio calculators. And yes, there is a "PC" you use to connect to your home while away! And all this in a document dated April 2013. Wow. Have they seen the iPhone or the Nest? Who will be buying these things?

OK, may be I'm wrong. Or may be I just don't care. We are lucky we can easily add ULE to our smart home products. If there is market that justifies the investment, we will be there. Actually, I keep my fingers crossed. The more fragmented the home automation market is, the better for us.