Thread Is Going Sub-GHz
The Thread Group board has approved work to put Thread's IP-based mesh on a Sub-GHz PHY, aimed at commercial and industrial networks rather than the home. No bands, no dates, and a new brand name to come.
On 21 September the Thread Group announced that its board of directors has approved extending Thread's standardised, IP-based, low-power mesh networking beyond 2.4 GHz onto a Sub-GHz physical layer.
Ann Olivo, the group's vice president of marketing, framed it as a natural next step in delivering reliable, secure, low-power wireless mesh to diverse IoT environments. The named target is commercial and industrial IoT rather than the smart home, with candidate applications listed as building automation, lighting retrofits in healthcare facilities, and property-wide industrial sensor networks.
What's missing from the announcement is everything a hardware team would need. No frequency bands — nothing on 868 MHz in Europe or 915 MHz in North America. No specification completion date, no silicon partner, no product timeline. The technology will carry its own distinct brand name, to be introduced in the coming months, and the announcement does not confirm the "Thread 2.0" label that has been speculated about. Specification work is described as already underway, following the same consensus-driven process used for every Thread release to date.
The physics is the whole argument. Lower-frequency signals propagate further and penetrate obstacles better than 2.4 GHz, which reduces the number of routers needed to cover a given area. For a campus, a hospital or a plant, that difference decides whether a sensor network needs forty powered nodes or twelve.
What makes this interesting rather than incremental is that Thread is IPv6 end to end. A Sub-GHz Thread node would be addressable by the same tooling and the same border-router model already used for 2.4 GHz Thread, rather than needing a protocol gateway the way LoRa-based and proprietary 868/915 MHz building systems do. The group's own positioning says it plainly: a path to unify fragmented proprietary Sub-GHz approaches around a common, IP-based open standard.
For context, Thread 1.4 is the current released specification, and since 1 January 2026 it has been the only version accepted for new certification applications. Radio vendors with existing Sub-GHz parts now have a standards track to aim at. Everyone else waits for a band plan.