The Lock-In Problem, Stated Plainly
Open standards are the reason a phone bought in Seoul works in Sheffield, and they are now the reason a door reader bought this year need not come from the same company that sold the campus its locks a decade ago. The technical reality is unglamorous: a standard is a published set of rules anyone can implement, and the fight over smart homes and campus access is a fight over who gets to write those rules.
The definition matters because it is looser than it sounds. An open standard is openly accessible and usable by anyone, and it is a common prerequisite that such standards carry an open licence providing for extensibility, with participation in development typically open to all comers. There is no single agreed definition, and interpretations vary with usage. The GSM, 4G and 5G standards that let most modern mobile phones work worldwide are the canonical example.
Why Proprietary Ecosystems Cost So Much
Campus access control has traditionally been built on a simple proposition: commit to a credential, install compatible readers and locks, and make sure every system behind them recognises every other. That works until it doesn’t. The credential, reader and access-control ecosystem becomes tied to the manufacturers and technologies selected years earlier, and the cost of changing course rises as the campus grows.
The mechanism is worth spelling out, because it is the same one that traps smart-home buyers. Many credential technologies have relied on proprietary formats and symmetric cryptography, in which participating devices share secret keys. Managing those keys across cards, readers and vendors complicates procurement, integration and security maintenance. A university that wants to change suppliers, or simply add a second credential type, may find its existing technology makes the transition difficult or expensive.
Olivia Renaud, a group product manager quoted by CampusIDNews, put the commercial side of it directly: “Proprietary solutions require business relationships, security relationships, and agreements to be established.” Every one of those relationships is a toll gate.
Common Rules, Any Manufacturer
Open credential standards invert the model. Instead of each manufacturer defining how a credential talks to a reader, the standard establishes common technical rules that any manufacturer can implement. Institutions that adopt the standard can then choose readers and other infrastructure from any participating manufacturer, while keeping the systems that manage access permissions.
The closest consumer analogy is USB and Bluetooth, which made it possible to connect peripherals from different vendors without proprietary connections. Open credential standards aim at the same outcome for access control: mix and match compatible credentials and readers rather than marry one brand.
Three efforts illustrate the push, per CampusIDNews: the Public Key Open Credential specification (PKOC), the Aliro standard for digital credentials, and LEAF Verified. All three seek to reduce dependence on proprietary credential technologies.
The Smart Home Runs On The Same Logic
For a household, the lock-in is more intimate but structurally identical. A hub, a handful of bulbs, a doorbell and a thermostat bought inside one ecosystem tend to stay inside it, because the protocol that lets them talk is owned rather than published. The Matter protocol’s pitch is that a device implementing the common rules can be controlled by any compliant platform, which turns a purchasing decision into a reversible one. The same reasoning applies to the reader on a campus door: once the credential standard is common property, the hardware becomes a commodity and the buyer keeps the leverage.
There is a caveat buried in the definitions, and it is the detail that matters for anyone assuming “open” means “free”. Many standards bodies, including ISO, IEC and ITU-T, permit specifications whose implementation requires patent licensing fees on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The World Wide Web Consortium goes further and ensures its specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis. Academics, the European Union and several governments, including Denmark, France and Spain, exclude standards requiring fees from their definitions of open. So “open standard” is a spectrum, and procurement teams should read the licence before the datasheet.
Beyond The Front Door: Networks And Hospitals
The same argument is being made in harsher environments. Time-Sensitive Networking is a family of IEEE 802.1 standards long used in industrial automation and the automotive industry, and it is now considered a fit for safety- and mission-critical aerospace and defence applications, helped by the wide availability of components that avoid vendor lock-in and by its deterministic properties. A dedicated IEEE 802.1DP Aerospace profile has been available since November 2025 to guide implementation in those markets.
Wolfram Zischka, senior product manager at TTTECH Aerospace, described the digital backbone of an aircraft, rotorcraft or land vehicle as the foundation of a house: build two storeys now, plan for four, and you would rather build on the existing foundation than tear it down. Traditional architectures were designed to connect a defined set of sub-systems, he said, and struggle with the bandwidth, data rates and real-time requirements of software-defined, AI-enabled platforms that expect continuous upgrades.
Healthcare offers the clearest numbers. Epic’s director of interoperability, Matt Doyle, writing in Healthcare IT Today, set out how nationwide diagnostic image exchange through TEFCA could reduce duplicate scans, lower costs and speed up care, with Epic’s standards-based image exchange rolling out now. A trust collaboration across patient record systems saved £4.1 million in three years, freed an estimated 275,000 hours of nursing and phlebotomy time across two trusts, and spared patients extra blood draws. Epic is calling for broader industry adoption of open standards to make diagnostic images accessible across organisations nationwide.
What It Means For A Buyer
The practical test for a household or an institution is not whether a product is clever but whether leaving it is cheap. Ask which published standard the device implements, whether the specification is royalty-free, and whether a second manufacturer’s reader or hub will recognise the credential you already own. On the campus side, the three named efforts give procurement officers something to specify in a tender rather than a brand to trust. In aerospace, the 802.1DP profile gives engineers a document to design against.
None of this makes interoperability automatic. Standards only bind the manufacturers who implement them, and the fee question can quietly narrow the field. But the direction of travel is clear enough: the value is migrating from the box on the door to the rules the box obeys, and the £4.1 million saved over three years is what happens when those rules are shared.
Sources
- Open standard
- Part 1: An intro to open standards for campus mobile credentials – CampusIDNews
- Open, scalable, and future-proof: TSN-based networks for aerospace and defense applications – TTTECH
- Six vacancies open on Hawaiʻi law enforcement standards board | Big Island Now
- Florida education commissioner responds to criticism of proposed science standards
- Fewer Care Delays, More Cost Savings: Nationwide Diagnostic Image Exchange Is Possible With TEFCA
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / wikimedia (CC CC0 1.0)
