Philips Hue’s smart lights are getting a connectivity upgrade

Philips Hue has announced a connectivity upgrade for its Matter-over-Thread-enabled smart bulbs that will allow them to run both Thread and Zigbee at the same time. The change means you can connect compatible Hue bulbs and fixtures directly to a Matter ecosystem — Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, or Google Home — while keeping them linked to a Hue Bridge and the Hue ecosystem.

“Today you cannot have Zigbee and Thread running at the same time, so when you commission it, you have to choose,” Philips Hue CTO George Yianni told The Verge. “If you want to then later switch, you have to reset it.”

Hue’s upcoming update is enabled by a radio synchronization feature developed by Hue’s chip supplier, Silicon Labs, called concurrent multiprotocol technology (CMP). The technology allows Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Thread to run in parallel.

“This means a light can be linked to a Hue Bridge or a Hue remote control and the Thread network,” says Yianni. “It will listen to both sets of commands and respond without you having to think about switching or setting it up differently.”

The feature will roll out later this year to Hue’s most recent devices built on Silicon Labs’ MG26 and SiMG301 wireless SoCs, which launched late last year. “It was always the plan to do that; it just wasn’t quite ready at launch,” says Yianni.

Interestingly, the Qorvo chip Ikea uses in its devices is capable of a similar technology, called ConcurrentCurrent. One advantage of enabling both radios is that powered devices could serve as mesh extenders. So your Hue bulbs could help support your Thread network.

Today, you can pair Hue lights with a Hue Bridge and then expose them to Apple Home, Google Home, and other Matter platforms via Matter bridging. With CMP, Matter traffic will no longer need to route through the Hue Bridge. Instead, lights can have two masters, maintaining simultaneous connections to both the Hue ecosystem and a Matter controller. This means you can pair directly with Matter without giving up Hue features.

The immediate benefit is flexibility today, but there’s also future-proofing for tomorrow. “We’re not using Thread for our own use cases,” says Yianni, but he doesn’t rule out moving the Hue ecosystem to Thread if the standard evolves to offer advantages over Zigbee.

“It does give us options if future evolutions in the Thread standard would allow us to use it for our use cases,” he says. “That would be something which would maybe make us reconsider the stance. If we can actually do better entertainment syncing, more motion-aware areas on a Thread network,” he says. “That’s not the case today and there are currently no plans to do that, but I can imagine a future where that might happen if it allowed us to do new features, offer new functionality.”

In the meantime, Hue users will soon be able to connect compatible bulbs directly to Apple Home, Google Home, and other Matter platforms, while continuing to use the features available through the Hue Bridge.