Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

These include features like IPV 6 and multicast discovery, which we want to make sure are consistent and reliable across routers ... The way routers implement their multicast discovery can be broken, and that leads to a pretty bad experience for users ... We need to make Wi-Fi work reliably for all of the IoT use cases.

But the other important factor is the ability to use your accessories, and some important ones, like your front door lock when there’s a power outage. If you have no infrastructure — your Wi-Fi router is down, your Thread border router is down — and you still want the ability to get into your house or do other things that might be smart home related. Those are some use cases that it’s explicitly designed for, but it’s not limited to that.