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Low power, low speed, short distance: ZigBee: This technology, ZigBee, had fallen entirely off my radar months ago, as I figured it was another for the scrapheap of history. Kevin Werbach noted it in passing today, and I took another look at their FAQ. What was obscure before is now made clear: ZigBee is the trade and certification name for 802.15.4, a spec design for personal area networks (that's what the 802.15 group is all about). The group behind this is called The ZigBee Alliance, renamed recently with more shades of Wi-Fi and The Wi-Fi Alliance (renamed in early October).
The goal of ZigBee appears to be to offer an even slower, lower-power alternative to Bluetooth, which itself is, in some ways, an alternative to Wi-Fi. Bluetooth was designed to consume relatively little power, and consequently only traverse short distances at low speeds (raw 1 Mbps). Bluetooth relies on rechargeable batteries, let's say. ZigBee's design goal appears to be more modest: the group behind it wants months or years of battery life out of ordinary AAs. As a result, ZigBee can transmit just a few tens or hundreds of kilobits per second, and its transceiver spends most of its time asleep. You can imagine its use in devices that currently use infrared and use alkaline batteries, like remote controls.