Matter has spent the past few years trying to make the smart home less chaotic and confusing for users and, while there’s been progress on getting devices singing and dancing across multiple ecosystems like Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home and SmartThings, the systems sitting behind those platforms are still very much their own thing.

The Broadband Forum wants to tackle that and have announced the rather complicated sounding “MatterService Data Model for USP Enabled Devices TR-517” - otherwise known as the Matter Service API - which is a new standardized interface designed to give broadband providers, router makers and smart home service developers a single way to access and manage Matter devices in the home.

It sounds fairly technical and dry… because it is; but the potential implications for smart home users could actually be pretty interesting.

As mentioned, Matter has done a lot to improve interoperability at the device level, but access to those devices is often still tied to the ecosystem managing them.

That can make life more complicated for companies that want to build services on top of your smart home.

TR-517 combines the Broadband Forum's USP remote management standard with Matter to create a common API that service providers and developers can use to understand the Matter devices operating on a network.

In theory, that means they can build a service once rather than creating separate versions for different Matter ecosystems.

The Broadband Forum says that could include everything from diagnostics and customer support tools to automations and energy management services.

It could also potentially allow a broadband provider or smart home service to spot problems with a Matter device before you even realize something has gone wrong yourself.

The Matter Service API is a tool for broadband providers, application developers and hardware companies to build new services around Matter. Whether consumers ever see the benefits depends entirely on whether those companies actually adopt it.

The Broadband Forum's Matter Service API builds on a direction the Connectivity Standards Alliance has already been pushing Matter towards: making the router and home network infrastructure a more important part of the smart home.

Matter 1.4 introduced certification for home routers and access points, and it seems as if the Broadband Forum is now looking at how those same gateways and hubs could become a platform for managing and building services around Matter devices.

The news also follows hot on the heels of the Broadband Forum’s liaison agreement with the Thread Group, announced in June, aimed at bringing Thread mesh networks closer to broadband infrastructure.

Thread is a key part of the Matter ecosystem, providing the low-power mesh networking technology used by many Matter devices, so bringing it closer to the broadband infrastructure could help make the smart home easier to manage at the network level.