rocco
Active Member
Steve, I'm not speaking to the user experience, that I agree is quite good. I'm speaking to the robustness of UPB, and the ability to support future applications.
As I said, the reliability of the physical portions of the protocol has you seeing few problems. But UPB has little room for error. If you look back at some threads, there are instances of peoples lights coming on a half hour after a switch is activated. This is what noise can do to UPB, but fortunately UPB has high noise immunity.
I don't believe that will last for long. The powerline is getting noisier every day, and the worst is yet to come. When I started using X10 in the early 80s, it was 100% reliable. In the late 90s, with switching power supplies, things went downhill fast.
Remember, if you set up a UPB network to broadcast a command four times, It take up almost two seconds of powerline time. That means no one else can flip a switch without a collision, and UPB has no real collision avoidance. In other words, UPB is very fragile.
If a protocol is going to rely on acknowledgments and retries, it should at least have the bandwidth to do so without requiring exclusive use of the medium for extended periods of time. This is why ZWave and Insteon have so much more bandwidth than UPB.
As I said, the reliability of the physical portions of the protocol has you seeing few problems. But UPB has little room for error. If you look back at some threads, there are instances of peoples lights coming on a half hour after a switch is activated. This is what noise can do to UPB, but fortunately UPB has high noise immunity.
I don't believe that will last for long. The powerline is getting noisier every day, and the worst is yet to come. When I started using X10 in the early 80s, it was 100% reliable. In the late 90s, with switching power supplies, things went downhill fast.
Remember, if you set up a UPB network to broadcast a command four times, It take up almost two seconds of powerline time. That means no one else can flip a switch without a collision, and UPB has no real collision avoidance. In other words, UPB is very fragile.
If a protocol is going to rely on acknowledgments and retries, it should at least have the bandwidth to do so without requiring exclusive use of the medium for extended periods of time. This is why ZWave and Insteon have so much more bandwidth than UPB.