The China Light Industry Council (CLIC) will set China's technological standards for smart home devices including electric appliances, locks, lighting and furniture.
This follows China’s attempts in PC and smartphone technology to develop local standards that go global following China’s export dominance. By creating their own standard (or their own version of an international standard), China makers hope to avoid the fees they pay for Western standards and certification.
If successful, it also allows China to ask Western buyers to pay license fees and certification in order to build products for export in China. It’s karma payback for years of Western high tech standards ownership.
CLIC set up a standards working group, an expertise group, an alliance of industry associations, as well as technological, inspection, testing, certification organizations.
First priority will be given to key standards in connectivity among devices, human-machine interface, cloud computing platform and big data.
CLIC and China Household Electric Appliance Research Institute jointly released white paper on Application of NB-IoT Technology to Smart Home-use Electric Appliance Industries. According to that paper, Wi-Fi modules will not be suitable for smart home application and instead, NB-IoT technology will be adopted due to low power consumption, wide-area coverage and low cost.
But make no mistake: if history repeats itself, this will be China’s own flavor of NB-IoT. Last time they did their own high tech flavor, they subsequently made foreigners buy rights from a few local companies.
The process to install their own standard runs in three stages. From 2017-2019, standards and related organizations and mechanisms for smart manufacturing will be set. From 2019-2022, an initial system of standards for smart home-use devices will be completed. From 2022-2025, such standards will be widely used in home-use devices.
