From The Verge.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy chats with Ken Fairbanks, a longtime customer of Insteon who ended up buying the smart lighting company when it went bankrupt.

Ken shares the story of how the early smart lighting protocol, founded in the post-X10 era when home automation moved from wired to wireless, floundered, and how he and a band of users brought it back from the dead. He dishes what he’s learned about how to keep the lights on — from customer loyalty and the value of subscriptions, to what tariffs are doing to the industry and how some hardware companies are really just pyramid schemes.

Then, in a special supersized Vergecast Hotline, Jen is joined by smart home expert Richard Gunther, co-host of The Smart Home Show, to tackle a bunch of your burning smart lighting questions. They answer everything from how to move your smart home, whether to choose smart switches or bulbs, to which Thread border router you should buy for your Matter setup. Plus, they run down how they have smart lighting working in their own homes. 

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