rvc Posted September 15, 2013 Posted September 15, 2013 Having just dump a bunch of money into an Insteon system for my home, I would like to ask if Insteon is going the way of X10? Is 2008 going to take out Smarthome like it did the X10 bunch? Or is it product quality that's getting too them? You don't have to be real observant to see that Insteon isn't exactly on fire and heavens knows it has had enough time to catch on.
Goose66 Posted September 15, 2013 Posted September 15, 2013 One of the best things that happened to X10 was the patents expiring, allowing lots of vendors to get into the fray. Of course, by that point the technology was suffering from age. Will this happen to Insteon? Well, frankly no. First, the earliest patents will not expire until the mid 2020s. Plus, there are plenty of alternatives such as Zigbee (IEEE802.15) and UPB (PLC). So we won't see a drop in prices and a flood of new devices in the market with Insteon like we did with X10. For example, there are no Insteon debugging/troubleshooting devices which are sorely needed,and would be cost effective to build if not for the Insteon licensing fees, I imagine.
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