Hawking Technologies announced today that it has joined the Z-Wave Alliance and plans to use Z-Wave technology in upcoming products. Hawking also said it plans to release a home control product using Z-Wave technology "very soon".
Z-Wave is a proprietary Personal Area Network (PAN) technology developed by Zensys A/S of Denmark. It competes with the Zigbee standard (aka IEEE 802.15.4) for mesh wireless control technology, primarily aimed at home control applications. Z-Wave uses a two-way RF system that operates in the 908MHz band while Zigbee operates in 2.4GHz (global), 915Mhz (Americas) and 868Mhz (Europe) bands.