https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
Here's Thread vs Zigbee:
https://www.rfwireless-world.com/Terminology/Difference-betw...
Zigbee suffers from some of this but the protocol is much lighter and payloads smaller, which means the MCU can spend more CPU time and energy decoding messages. If we can get a chip that combines cellular with Bluetooth and LoRa, that would be a killer IoT platform.
The mesh network stuff was cool but suffered from a strange internal product decisions that made it useless for most applications.
First off, it was not created with a specific customer in mind. Most customers using IoT platforms want cellular connectivity, to allow for zero-setup on the customer or installer-side, and the ability to push OTA firmware updates. Mesh also used a Thread which was not super useful at the time. The vision was that you would be able to have a local network with one or more redundant gateways that ingress and egress of data through a few links.
This created another problem: monetization. In the gen 2 era of Particle where most customers with significant spend connected via cell network, Particle were able to charge a high margin rate and get considerable revenue as a result of their mvno business. This promise of a mesh network, where you could potentially reduce the number of internet connected devices to 10% of your original allocation, required rethinking of pricing as to capitalize on the devices that were connected to the mesh network but not acting as a gateway. What they did next destroyed any chance at widespread adoption. They created the most convoluted pricing systems where they were directly charging fees for a mesh connected device to be connected at all, as well as per network. Particle, whose OTA product famously worked extremely well coupled with a generous free tier (for device management) and that was easy to understand, decided to go generally available with a crippled mesh product, no customers for it, and extremely hard-to-understand pricing. Developers originally flocked to them because they could be certain of the service and features of each tier and that it just worked very well, but they destroyed trust with developers who were the genesis of most of their inbound leads.
What they should have done was to launch the products with a mesh communication library and charged for the gateways, using one pricing model if it was a stand-alone device and an upgraded one that would allow it to route mesh traffic through the internet. Oh, they also should have fucking gone with LoRa just like everyone was asking because 2.4Ghz at its tiny power is just outside of range of anything actually useful for the customers who actually wanted mesh networks
There is space another mesh product that is sanely designed and priced reasonably. I can’t see it coming from Particle, however. If anyone wants to start this, hit me up - my contact info is in my profile.