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Ember announced plans for the release of its Internet Protocol (IP)-based low-power wireless networking stack for smart metering and smart grid applications. An early version of the Ember IP Stack has already been available to a limited group of customers and Ember plans to progressively expand the availability to a larger base of its customers in the coming months as features get added and the stack undergoes higher levels of testing. Ember’s plans call for a Beta release of the stack in Q3 2011 followed by general availability by the end of the year. The Ember IP stack is targeted at smart grid applications, especially smart meters and home area network (HAN) devices.
“Ember’s revelation of their plans for an IP Stack only makes public the significant progress they have been making in the background,” said Kent Dickson, CTO of Tendril, an Ember customer and an energy platform company. “Their experience helping customers deploy tens of millions of ZigBee devices in the field is invaluable in shaping a technology that will be a part of the long life span of smart grid systems.”
“We have been working hard within the standards bodies we are associated with to forge low-powered IP standards that constitute a reliable, scalable and secure platform to help consumers and utilities reduce energy consumption and their carbon footprint well into the future,” said Bob LeFort, Ember’s CEO. “Our existing and new customers need to start making important product design decisions for their next-generation devices and now is the right time to give them and the industry better visibility of our schedule and the path towards a standards-based IP solution.”
Over the past two years Ember has invested engineering resources towards its commitment and vision of providing a reliable, code efficient, and high performance IP solution running on IEEE 802.15.4 radios that is best suited for the characteristics and profile that is typical of scalable, low-power wireless networks. In that pursuit, Ember has contributed to the efforts being made by standards bodies such as IETF and the ZigBee Alliance that are working towards enabling native IP support for smart meters and HAN devices.
