Somewhere in between IRDA and Bluetooth lies a market sweetspot. The IEEE 802.15 WPAN group is working on the next generation of low-power low-datarate low-cost wireless network standards including one called ZigBee. Zigbee is a combination of the 802.15.4 RF standard and some custom networking protocols. An asia c-net article states up to 255 devices can communicate at speeds up to 250kbits/set using the 2.4GHz band at 30 feet away. From the Zigbee FAQ “ZigBee’s addressing scheme supports 255 active nodes per ‘network coordinator’, and multiple network coordinators can be linked together to support extremely large networks. With support for 16 channels in the 2.4GHz band, and 255 nodes per network coordinator, ZigBee networks can contain over 4,000 unique nodes in a single network with high system reliability.”
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