You may have never heard of Thread border routers, but they're aiming to become a smart home staple—working behind the scenes to tie together all your smart home gear. Better yet? You might already own one.

What Does a Thread Border Router Do?

If you've followed any smart home news over the last few years, even loosely, there's a good chance you've heard chatter about the Matter smart home standard.

The appeal of Matter, in brief, is that it breaks the smart home market out of the siloed mess it is currently in and allows for simple cross-platform communication. Instead of buying all-in with a single vendor and getting stuck with just that vendor's hardware and that vendor's hub, you can live a hub-free life with all your smart home devices talking to each other through Matter.

Despite the hub-free promise of Matter, however, that doesn't mean there's nothing hub-like in the Matter ecosystem. The hub-free promise is the promise that you won't be locked into using hardware from a specific vendor in the way that, say, Hue smart bulbs must be paired with the Hue Hub.

In the Matter ecosystem, there is a piece of hardware called a Thread border router. Matter is built on Thread, a low-power and low-latency mesh network protocol designed specifically for the smart home and the Internet of Things.

Just like the Wi-Fi devices in your home need your internet router to communicate with the greater internet and break out of the constraints of your home network, devices communicating within the Thread mesh network in your smart home need a way to break out of the Thread network and into the local Wi-Fi network (and beyond to the greater internet).

That's where the Thread border router comes in. As the name suggests, it's a network device that sits on the border of the Thread network and routes communication from within that network to the networks beyond, just as the internet router in your home does the same for computers, tablets, smart TVs, and more.

Will I Need to Buy a Thread Border Router?

The good news is you likely won't need to buy a Thread border router. Or, more specifically, it's very unlikely you'll need to go out of your way to buy (or DIY) a discrete Thread border router.

While there are companies manufacturing stand-alone Thread border routers like Kirale Technologies, and you can even roll your own by combining a Thread development board with a Raspberry Pi, you should skip that route. In fact, considering it would cost you $80-100 to do it, we wouldn't recommend it to anyone but the most ardent home network nerds and DIYers who want the thrill (and learning experience) of doing it.

One of the many appealing things about Matter is that major players in the smart home industry have signed on to support it not just in theory but practically: by incorporating Thread into their hardware.

So instead of heading to Best Buy and purchasing a discrete Thread border router to add yet another thing to your pile of smart home hubs and smart home gear, you'll use the Thread border router built right into hardware you already own. And if you don't already own a smart home product that includes a Thread border router, you likely will in the future.

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Here are some examples of smart home hardware that already have Thread border routers built into them:

• Apple TV 4K (Second Generation)
• Apple HomePod Mini
• Amazon Echo Smart Speakers (Fourth Generation)
• Amazon eero Mesh routers (eero Beacon, eero 6, eero Pro, and eero Pro 6)
• Nanoleaf Elements, Shapes, and Lines Light Panels
• Nest Hub Max, Nest Hub (Second Generation), and Nest Wi-Fi Routers

If you don't already own any of the above devices, you could always buy one that fits with your current needs—like upgrading your existing Apple TV or jumping on the mesh network train with a new eero router—or simply wait.

Thread border routers can be built into any piece of smart home gear that has an always-on connection to the mains power of your home. Despite Matter's rocky start, smart home manufacturers have gradually been adding Thread border routers to their devices, though they're still far from ubiquitous.