The Matter standard is the most significant recent development affecting connected lighting, according to UK outdoor lighting company Festive Lights.

For several years, the sector was characterised by competing and largely incompatible ecosystems, which required separate applications and dedicated hubs, and frequently prevented products from different brands from operating on a single network. Matter changes that by allowing devices from different manufacturers to work together.

Festive Lights has released an overview of the technical and market developments behind the growing adoption of app-controlled and networked outdoor lighting. The assessment examines the transition from mechanical timers and dusk-to-dawn photocells towards systems managed by smartphone applications and wireless mesh networks, and considers how the recent consolidation of smart-home interoperability standards is affecting the way households specify, install and operate exterior illumination.

The review is directed at a residential market in which connected lighting has moved from an enthusiast product to a mainstream category. According to industry research, the global smart lighting market was valued at more than $27bn in 2026 and is forecast to grow at an annual rate approaching 20 per cent over the remainder of the decade. Within that total, analysts identify the outdoor application segment as the fastest-growing, driven by falling hardware costs, wider availability of wireless control, and the extension of home-automation habits from interior rooms into gardens, patios and boundaries.

That fragmentation has narrowed with the wider adoption of Matter, an interoperability standard maintained by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (csa-iot.org), the industry body responsible for the earlier Zigbee protocol. Matter is an application-layer standard rather than a wireless signal: it defines a common language that devices use to identify themselves and communicate, and it operates over existing network technologies, principally wifi and the Thread low-power mesh protocol.

The specification has advanced through successive revisions, with version 1.6 released in mid-2026, and the number of certified products has expanded, with industry commentary citing more than one thousand Matter-certified devices and a comparable number of Thread-certified devices available by 2026, a marked increase on the position two years earlier.

Thread is of particular relevance to outdoor installations. It forms a self-healing wireless mesh in which each mains-powered device can relay signals for others, extending coverage across a property as further units are added rather than depending on a single connection to a domestic router. Bluetooth, by contrast, retains a longer track record in lighting specifically and remains the dominant connectivity method in many decorative products, including for the initial setup of Matter devices. The three principal smart-home ecosystems, operated by Amazon, Apple and Google, now support the shared standards, alongside other major platforms.

“For anyone lighting an area larger than a single room, coverage has always been the constraint,” said Jana Dalton, a specialist in exterior lighting at Festive Lights (www.festive-lights.com). “A mesh network addresses that directly, because each fixture can pass a signal to the next, so range improves as the installation grows rather than weakening at the edges. That characteristic suits gardens, where the distance from the house to a boundary or a remote seating area is often where earlier wireless products struggled.”