Hi!
Zwave LR looks promising!
/S
It’s still a little way off yet. It’s also not a mesh system, so all communications will need to be direct to the controller, but it should be an interesting system and will be upgradable on the 700 series chips 
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Sounds like it is good for battery driven sensors, which will not mesh anyway. So if the article is correct a battery powered device/sensor with 400m range and a 10+ year battery life.
Battery sensors do participate with the mesh routing in a traditional ZWave mesh network. However yes, this is designed largely for sensors where they might be out in the garden and therefore a mesh doesn’t work as you can’t get mains devices to bridge the gap.
Yes, that is the stated goal by Silabs. They had their developers conference over the past few days and this was the comment at the release.
Also interesting, Sillabs announced in mid-December (2021) a new 800-series chipset (which presumably exists to be more highly optimized for LR products/applications).
Stated: integrated power amp, and 50% better battery life compared to 700 series chipset).
Honestly, if there will be Z-Wave (LR) products with 1+mile range, what engineering case remains for mesh networking topology in the typical Z-Wave application? I’m not talking about the practical case for Z-Wave mesh as an end-user or integrator (e.g. the huge installed base, the large and diverse ecosystem of mesh products etc.). I’m thinking in terms of, all else being equal (which it never is) what’s the point of building a complicated mesh, if LR is able to deliver anything close to what they’re promising?
Many of the of the routing, healing, congestion, contention and repeating headaches (read: latency) would go away, or at a minimum would not bring the characteristic of a sharp performance decline (collapse) in the extremes of range and congestion on the air interface. My experience with Z-Wave mesh is that network performance improved dramatically only after thinking in terms of optimizing device placement to reduce total hop counts.
I’ve always suspected/imagined that mesh networking in general is most fundamentally a design compromise inherent to the constraints imposed by low EIRP, and low power. If those constraints go away (or are dramatically reduced), is there any point in meshing for the vast majority of applications?
Interesting info on the 800… but LR will only apply to new devices, and clearly not every even newly developed device will be LR capable so that does not make the engineering case go away.
Your question is pretty academic anyway.
Any real installation is a mix of various ZWave generations and applications are not specific to or limited to only use new LR devices. There will always be applications that rely on routing to work and the routing implementation in LR devices.
You should not trust in marketing statements such as 1+mile. In the end there’s hard limits on RF power and assuming LR will be sufficient for all use cases is naive, even more so now as there aren’t any devices yet.
Even more so as conditions on site will always be dynamic: say you move a physical object into the line of sight between your LR device and your controller and suddenly it doesn’t work any more.
In operations reality, regular network mesh maintenance updates will determine if the direct (non routed) connection works and will prefer to use it over routed connections anyway so direct LR will coexist but not make the engineering case go away.
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