While not quite the One Ring, the arrival of Matter opens the door for a significant attempt at solving the interoperability problems faced in the smart home. This should catch the eye of the operator crowd, which has viewed that particular endeavour as a major headache that would best be avoided. Matter is the name of the smart home interoperability specification that Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) has been working on for the past three years. CHIP was housed inside the Zigbee Alliance, even though CHIP sat at a higher level in the stack than Zigbee’s low power wireless mesh protocol. To this end, the Zigbee Alliance has rebranded as the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), and CHIP is now…