I would disagree with this. If you can avoid multiple systems, HA will be simpler to administer and easier to fix and maintain. I would also suggest avoiding zwave if you can. HA support for zwave is materially worse than zigbee, and not at the same level as Homeseer or other packages. Many folks do use it successfully, but I have found it much less reliable.
I will never buy a Matter device, as I don’t want my IOT devices that are designed to be cheap and not invested in much by the vendor after a sale on my internal home network. I love that zigbee is not an IP protocol, and is unable to talk to anything in my home except through Z2M’s open source gateway functionality. Cheap Chinese device software has no place being attached to your home IP network.
Take a look on all the devices on your existing network… how many of those are not made in China?
Even high level ($$$) devices are almost all made in China now days. Or at least have a bunch of Chinese components inside.
This is the sad true.
What would be the effect with 50+ devices on your WiFi network…
That’s only reliability, what about security?
You would need a (semi-)professional WiFi setup because I think with consumer-like (modem)/router/AP you might get comparable issues.
They work Even the ~100 (wifi) esphome nodes in my network are working without any hick ups.
Well, I use (very) old used hardware (some AP’s bought on ebay for like $10). Only requirment for me is that they are capable of running openwrt as it gives me full ownership and control (the same for wifi devices with esp/home)
I have shared this (OP’s) view for many years now. It (zigbee) may have been a bit cheaper in the past, but as time goes on there are more places selling alternatives like zwave. I’m in the US so things may vary in other parts of the world. As mentioned earlier zigbee share the same RF space with wifi. Also bluetooth. Also using a microwave can cause interference in the same band. Cordless telephones and baby monitors too. Very busy in that frequency band.
There are things to mitigate this, but that is only if they are all on the same system which they obviously aren’t.
For these reasons I have mostly Z-wave stuff and only a couple wifi (wled) things. I also run wire to everything possible so wifi is used for relatively few things in the house. Really only mobile devices.
I don’t see any disappearing devices with my zwave like I do with my hue stuff.
I have a zigbee HUE network, a z2m network and a wifi-network.
When setting things up I made sure to be on different channels for all of them to reduce interference.
A very good explanation of this is at https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/zigbee-wifi-coexistence/ and includes a downloadable wifi-zigbee channel chart.
Despite that at a certain moment I experienced problems with the HUE network. I blamed it on hub overload but eventually found out that my Fritzbox router had an option swirched on to select the best wifi-channel. This meant the router had gone from wifi channel 6 to wifi channel 1 interfering with the HUE network at zigbee channel 11. Setting it back to wifi channel 6 cured all problems.
Having about 40 lights + some accessoires on HUE, 25 sensors+plugs on z2m and several units using wifi.
So always check the current channels when you experience problems, it might be something changed!
From my understanding the wifi devices will always be the “strongest” (“loudest”) ones as they are allowed by specifications. Both zigbee and BLE for example are more limited regarding airtime and (transmit) power and therfor obviously (even with more efficient protocols) can not really “compete” with wifi devices
Just think about a room full of people. Some are limited to talk only 10% of the possible “loudness” and also only 10% of the time (that could be like Zig- or BLE-). On the other hand others (wifi) can just speak/scream a maximum of 100% in “loudness” and 100% of the time. It’s quite obvious in such a scenario that the low power devices would have much more troubles to understand each others and that re-transmissions are likely needed to get a “message” from sender to receiver.
This diagram clearly shows why ch 26 is such a good idea. For single wifi AP networks in small homes with few neighbors, you can get away a lot of successful configurations. However, a lot of people use all the WiFi channels with multiple AP’s, and even if its simple like in an apartment, neighbor devices can create interference as well.
I think keeping IOT devices on 2.4 Ghz, and having phones, computers, TV’s etc… on 5GHz channels where you have a lot more spectrum is good for both - the IOT network doesn’t have to deal with high speed flows that take up a lot of spectral resources, and the 5 GHz devices don’t end up being slowed down by a lot of devices sending a bunch of small frames.
If you use VLAN’s you can also segment the IP broad cast domains and keep a lot of multicast traffic segmented as well.
@fresnoboy
Only not all devices support zigbee channel 26.
ZLL (the Zigbee Light L,) used by lamps are only supporting zigbee channels 11,15,20 and 25.
I am a US user, so channels 12 and 13 are not options, and not selectable in my APs. If you can keep some spectrum free for zigbee, that’s best, but it does work even with WiFi as well, just that response time may be impaired because of interference.
I bet you have a Zigbee device who is a router acting up or is malfunctioning causing the routing table to be foo-bared. Look at the ZHA mapping and see where everything is routing. Probably will help you figure out which device(s) is the culprit.
Even the ~100 (wifi) esphome nodes in my network are working without any hick ups.
or BLE-
