Fabulous Las Vegas

Las Vegas is fabulous. You know that even before you arrive, as this is exactly what the flight attendants tell you when boarding a LAS flight. Of course. It cannot be anything else but fabulous. And the Vegas fame aside, it really was fabulous for us las week at LightFair International, the first grand industry trade show after COVID19.

There was desire and energy in people to meet face to face and shake hands. We saw that back in March at New York's LEDucation. Which was the indicator of the LightFair to come.

The booths were crowded for all three days - we has meetings up until the last hour. And of course mornings ad evenings were busy too with joint breakfasts with customers and after hours parties. It has been so encouraging to see that much energy in people and so many happy faces.

This all means the lighting industry is back up to speed and guess what is the leading theme these days? Energy savings. Of course. LED retrofits are becoming no-brainers and with lighting control systems maturing, the "controls" have become the standard option in just about any setup. LEDs together with controls deliver between 75%-90% of energy savings. With such score all arguments to not retrofit an ageing lighting system fall apart. Every day the old technology is operated is a lost day, contributing to depletion of natural resources, negative climate impact and (for those who do not care too much about the environment) higher costs.

On the controls font, Bluetooth has clearly established itself as the leading (or should I say the only?) game in town. There are some remote echoes of wired technologies, mostly proprietary. The lighting world is fully wireless now, as it happened with other connected applications - where mobile phones and WiFi laptops ripped all cords years ago. Wires are only used to deliver power and it will stay this way for some time. But any connectivity / communication / controls is wireless now and there is no coming back. Wireless has matured to the point it simply just works and nobody even tries raising up concerns of scalability, reliability and security. We have had enough of high profile case studies already to prove the maturity of wireless systems.

Within the wireless category it is Bluetooth versus Bluetooth versus Bluetooth now. On one hand I can say this is a huge win for the technology. There is no one trying to use anything else. People have finally understood WiFi was too complex and too power hungry for lighting / sensing. And nobody dares to propose Thread, even though there are still marketing fanfares ringing around the smart home standard called Matter. I can imagine Matter working just OK over Thread for super small setups like a handful of lights operated in a unicast mode, with an additional door lock or a thermostat. Thread is not designed and not capable of handling any larger scale multicast (=group control) setups, which are the core requirement for commercial / professional lighting systems.

So Bluetooth is the only technology option left now and it works super well. There is still work to be done, as many vendors are taking shortcuts implementing their simplified / reduced proprietary stacks (while claiming all the benefits of the full "qualified" Bluetooth mesh). This definitely is a temporary situation which will sort itself out. There is no single argument why any of the proprietary Bluetooth solutions would stand he test of time. They have been rushed to market skipping several layers of security and scalability, but this approach will not last. One by one they will be falling victim of undelivered promises and in the end everyone will settle on the fully open, interoperable Bluetooth mesh. As there as so many benefits of doing so, with the long term security of investment being the key factor. Any vendor going for a proprietary solution today locks itself into what ultimately becomes a dead end. 

The history has already proven this point - there is no proprietary system present in any industry. Why would lighting be different?