FabianPhilips Hue was one of the first partners to offer official Matter integration. Since November 2022, it has been possible to connect the Hue Bridge to the Matter smart home standard, at that time still as a beta. The official launch followed in September 2023. Now it seems that something is happening again with Philips Hue and Matter.
Over the past few weeks, a number of new Philips Hue light sources have appeared at the US regulatory authority FCC. No real conclusions can be drawn from most of the entries in the database, but the latest two entries from April 17 reveal a very exciting detail.
The FCC has scrutinized two Hue White bulbs and published the following label:
In addition to the familiar obligatory imprints and the logos for Zigbee and Bluetooth, we also see a setup code for Matter. This has never been seen before in this form, as Philips Hue has so far only made the Hue Bridge compatible with Matter. A direct Matter integration of a Hue light in a smart home was not possible until now.
Zigbee and Bluetooth are not enough for Matter
I hardly think that this is an oversight or that the Matter logo was simply printed on for fun. However, one detail still leaves me with a big question mark: All of the FCC documents for the two newly approved Hue bulbs only mention Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee as wireless methods. However, these two standards are not part of Matter.
Apart from the Bluetooth setup, Matter only uses Thread and WiFi – and there are no details on this for the Hue lights. There are indeed wireless chips that support several wireless standards, such as Zigbee and Thread. Aqara already uses this technology in some of its products. Will such a chip soon also be used by Philips Hue?
One document states: “This product only supports BLE 125k/500k/1M/2Mbps:2402-2480MHz, Zigbee:2405-2480MHz. The other functions, bands and modes was disabled to use by manufacturer in the software, the end user has no capability to activate it.” But perhaps Philips Hue has the option of activating other bands and modes via the firmware?
I think your conclusions about any new Hue bulbs having dual radios for Zigbee or Thread is probably correct.
Does this suggest that a new Hue hub of some sort, with Thread and Matter, might be a possibility? Perhaps capable of unifying Wiz and Hue products into a single platform?