I am rapidly expanding my smart home and need to decide which 230v actors I buy next. I already got 3 shellys 1PM going (WLAN), but I am nervous about my WLAN breaking down soon.
A few of them connect to access points, do they take the load from the router? Is there a way to find out the limit? (i know there is a theoretical limit, not talking about that).
I do like the shellys, but when the cause issues in the long run, not sure if I better look at sonoff zigbee hardware
Watched to many bad films or read to many vague comments from “experts” in this forum?
Yes, add more and more devices to your router and see if you can break it or if it breaks on you!
I did the other way around. Zigbee and matter failed hard on me and I switche over completely to esphome wifi hardware. Around 60 nodes on my old router (no fancy fritzbox).
Your limit when it comes to WiFi is your IP range allocated to the network you are using with the main DHCP host and the Access points setup as mesh routers in your setup to extend the range at the time.
If your main router and access points can’t keep up with the traffic then you need to upgrade to a set that can.
I take this all with couple grains of salt nowadays. Because I opt-in for zigbee in the beginning as it was supposed(!) to be always compatible (despite the manufacture), always local and always works - so the comments speak. The reality kind of proofed the opposite for me. Interesting mostly the same people praising zigbee/matter/you-name-it spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about wifi. From my mileage I couldn’t confirm any of this and to the contrary of zigbee/matter my esphome wifi devices do just work! Today over 60 esphome nodes on an old school wifi router and no problems at all.
Also one wifi device does not put the same load/traffic as another one. Think about you streaming 4k on your mobile producing easily 100 or even 1000 times more traffic/load than a typical esphome node sitting in idle!
You might have several issues with your current setup you need to look into before you decide to replace it.
First you have a mix of repeaters of different standards, like 2.4Ghz only and 2.4Ghz/5Ghz mixed.
A change from a connection to the 2.4Ghz network on the mixed mode repeater to the 2.4Ghz only repeater will happen when it detect a weak signal on the currently connected repeater and a far better signal on the other repeater. This shift will be quick.
But if a connection is made to the 5Ghz network repeater and the signal is weak, then it can not find another 5GHz signal on the other repeater, so it will try to keep the signal as long as possible and only once it is totally unavailable will it start to look for other signals and find the 2.4Ghz signal.
The bad thing here is that the 2.4Ghz network reach further than the 5Ghz and some network cards prefer to use the same connection point, so it might connect to the 2.4Ghz repeater on the mixed repeater and once it is there then it might discover the better signal on the 2.4Ghz only repeater and switch there afterwards.
Every switch will cause an interruption in the connection. In newer network protocols this have been minimized a lot, but the 2.4GHz only repeater does for sure not support those protocols.
This issue will have been more and more prevalent over the years as more and more devices adapt the 5Ghz frequency spectrum and it will probably continue so in the future.
Secondly you might also have interference with other networks, especially on the 2.4Ghz spectrum band. 5Ghz is only used for WiFi, AFAIK, but 2.4Ghz is used for WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, RF devices and lots of other stuff, and some of these protocols have seen a rise in usage in the last couple of years too, so you might yourself have installed devices using these protocols and if you have close neighbors then they may also have invested in devices using them.
Moving the 2.4Ghz WiFi frequency might improve its reliability too and moving your Zigbee too might also, if you have such one.
See the overlap picture on this article to see the correlation between WiFi and Zigbee.
Many of your WiFi devices might not even be able to use 5Ghz. This is the fact for many cheap devices and it is only recently that ESP chips for the 5Ghz band has become available, which is one of the chips many cheap devices use.
Question was: So I should replace the 600 with the 1200 AX router, right?
Since you mentioned that is “my first problem”. Question is, how to resolve that.
I did look into the channel setup and overlap with zigbee. I did switch from auto channel to 1 (Zigbee runs on channel 20). This was still very bad. I suppose either my neighbour is using the same or smth else.
Now I am on 11 and it looks promising. My front door camera went from 5-11Mbits up to 100-120 Mbits and I can finally enjoy opening that stream. Also the usage in % went down under 50%
Also I removed the auto channel assignment and config of the repeater in the mesh network. As well as disabled the “guest wifi” - I will activate it when we do have guests. 99% of the time this is not the case.
Thx for the Zigbee / Wifi overlap hint, did not think this was such a big issue.
TLDR; if they are upgrading they want a wifi 7 capable router with 2.5GbE ports at least then upgrade the rest of the network as needed to take advantage (ie when more client devices support MLO) Else they can stick to a 6E capable router to save on some cost but still have a decent upgrade, they don’t need 10GbE ports as that is more for heavier bandwith loads unless they have a specific need for it.
The whole point was to avoid having WiFi gear with different standards, because it makes roaming between them problematic.
That means if they buy a WiFi 6E or WiFi 7 AP, then all other APs should be upgraded too.
If you have the option set the wifi from 20MHz to 40MHz for 2.4 and from 80 to 160 for 5Ghz, a wider channel increases the bandwidth but can induce some reduced stability whilst reducing the number of over-lapping channels.
Fritzbox 7530 (will be AX soon) with 1200 AX Repeater for all consumer devices (mobiles, tablets, laptops)
and an openWRT Router for all IoT stuff. I can control the access with the firewall easily and the Xiaomi AX3000T covers the whole house. I might keep it at 20 MhZ, because stability is more important then bandwidth with the IoT. With the Fritz I can not choose the MhZ tho.
Also removed 6 wifi plugs from the system (had them for eletricity measures, but with solar now it is unnecessary - we do have more power then we consume).
Going to replace some of the shellys as well with zigbee actors and then remove some of the zigbee bulbs (controlling the light with that is easier with less traffic).
