Ikea’s latest Dirigera smart home hub is arriving this November for €59.99 (around $59), twice as much as the current Trådfri gateway sells in Europe and a month after than promised.
A marketing page for the Dirigera hub, which supersedes the gateway for Ikea’s smart home ecosystem, is on the German Ikea site.
We also found pages for the corner on Spanish and Norwegian Ikea websites. A note on the Norwegian site that it’s a “new and better replacement for TRÅDFRI gateway. Sales start in November.”
When asked about the new hub, Ikea said pricing was still TBD, but we knew it would cost more than the Trådfri gateway, which currently sells for €29. “It is a little bit more expensive since it also has more capabilities and functionality,” said Rebecca Töreman, business leader at Ikea. The new Matter-ready, Thread-enabled smart home hub is coming next month and costs €59.99. Ikea also said a new Home Smart app would arrive with the new hub.
According to Ikea, the Dirigera hub will be Matter-ready, so its release is a good sign that Matter — promised in the fall of 2022 — is not far behind. The Matter is a new intelligent home interoperability standard that promises to make devices communicate with each other, regardless of manufacturer or ecosystem.
With support for Matter, any Ikea product connected to the hub should be controllable through any Matter-enabled ecosystem. Apple, Google, Amazon, and many more have all committed to supporting Matter. However, Ikea hasn’t stated which existing products might be upgraded to support the new standard. The company already has integrations with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Home.
The Dirigera hub has Wi-Fi, Zigbee, and Thread radios on board, and the latter allows it to act as a Thread border router, which is a primary protocol used by Matter. It is slightly slimmer than the Trådfri gateway and has an ethernet port and a USB-C jack for power.