A new FCC filing suggests that Ring will debut a new Wi-Fi smart light bulb soon, complementing its smart lighting line launched early this year. Unlike the company’s current lighting options, this is a traditional smart bulb that you screw into a light socket.
The frequencies that the “Ring Smart Lightbulb” will use provide some clues as to its possible operation. The bulb uses both the 900MHz and 2.4GHz bands. While the latter connects it to your home network, the 900MHz band may mean the bulb will operate within the wider Ring Smart Lighting platform.
Those lights require the Ring Bridge, which controls the operation of the lights, and is how they communicate with other Ring products. According to FCC filings from January, the Bridge uses 900MHz to communicate with the lights, and the Ring Smart Lightbulb uses the same frequencies as other Ring Smart Lighting.
While this involves a fair amount of speculation, without any apparent motion-sensing capabilities in the lightbulb itself, it makes sense. The bulb also supports 2.4GHz, so it’s not out of the question that the bulb might be able to operate without the Bridge via Wi-Fi.
From the image above and the proposed label, the Ring Smart Lightbulb appears to be a PAR38 bulb, a standard size. This seems to be the only smart lightbulb for which Ring has applied for certification so far: we’ve searched FCC filings and haven’t found others.
The latest filing is one of many in what appears to be a busy CES 2020 for the Amazon-owned company. We spotted a filing for the Ring Video Doorbell 3 in late October, and another for the Ring Chime Pro the following month.
Ring does not comment on FCC filings as a general practice, so we’re left to speculate on what this all means. But combined with the most current filing, it now appears that Ring is not only set to overhaul its existing line but introduce several new products as well. Luckily, it’s less than a month to CES 2020 — so we won’t need to wait long to find out precisely what the company has planned.
