That comment was towards having to built an extra WiFi network to achieve the same benefit as a ZigBee network.
Zigbee and WiFi usually send with the same power and the bandwidth for data is actually higher for a ZigBee network, because the frequency will set the upper limit for both networks, but ZigBee is a slimmer protocol, so the overhead will be lower than WiFi.
Zigbee is not meant to use this bandwidth though. It is made to always have available bandwidth for a time critical packet.
The lower overhead and usually smaller data packet too means it have it easier to air time than WiFi.
There is a reason why Z-wave and ZigBee exist and also why Matter did not go with WiFi as the base communication protocol.
The power on WiFi and ZigBee is the same.
And the view that ZigBee problems is more common than WiFi problem based on this forum is flawed.
If you have WiFi problems, then you do not link it to IoT, so you do not come here to get it fixed.
Zigbee is linked only to Iost, so the forum here is a logical place to come.
I’m a happy zigbee user and some would say promoter. I have what I consider a robust zigbee net.
I am fairly tech agnostic, using the tech that best fits. I have a mix of Zigbee(70+ devices), Lutron Caseta(50+), and WiFi(20+).
I in my experience Zigbee can be more finicky than wifi. A marginal zigbee device (especially a bad router) can cause mystery issues that can be hard to track down. You generally don’t see that on wifi because the devices are mostly independent from each other and not tied up in an interrelated mesh.
For newbs, a big wifi disadvantage is credential management. Experienced know we need a utility vlan to minimize this, but changing multiple wifi devices can be more headache than zigbee re-pairing when all of the sudden the prior newb suddenly realizes he has 40 devices to re-home because of a router change.
But…
Zigbee’s biggest advantage is BATTERY LIFE. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I haven’t seen anything wifi that can live for two years on a single coin cell.
I expect virtually all the users posting their zigbee problems here to have a working wifi
And because it is such a resilient and stable technology a “poor wifi” still works (when in range obviously) and doesn’t degrade. Their is seriously (couple of decades working in IT) few things as rock solid as our WIFI’s. Often users set up their ISP router and throw it in the corner without touching it for years - because it just works
Which is a typical problem for zigbee meshes from what I read over the years. The answer is typical you need to buy more zigbee routers! From a commercial point of view that technology makes absolute sense at it allows cross selling to the fullest. Combine that with some nice marketing speech and your customers will happily enter that rabbit hole. Best part: People which already bought Z-Products are most likely stick with it because they already made an invest.
I see you are an older semester too. As an IT consultant with a couple of decades I actually can confirm that when 5GHz was introducedover 20 years ago that some clients indeed had struggles connetcing to mixed 2,4/5Ghz networks. But that was around the year 2000 and I didn’t experienced even one device the last decade that had such problem.
Do you have any reports from recently that this is a real problem or was that just recycled? Next story for the kids the Y2K bug maybe?
That’s very correct. For now it looked to me that @WallyR was ether trying to project the problems he has with his zigbee and blame wifi for it or he fell for miss information and is repeating them
The benefit of wifi is that virtually everyone has this already deployed - probably even flat-earther Unlike with Z-infrastructure you don’t need to invest to have one
Well @WallyR - I asked you repeatedly to proof any of your false claims/information but you don’t bother at all Why is that? Don’t you know better or do you actually know better and do this with intention?
Just a simple question: When Zigbee and wifi would use the same power how does Zigbee use less power?
It’s almost alarming how much miss information to be found in only one sentence of yours
I wanted to link to the connectivity standard alliance to show the “offical” specs - but they request a form for this But anyway, wikipedia should be trusted in this regard (or do you have better sources @WallyR?)
Data rates vary from 20 kbit/s (868 MHz band) to 250 kbit/s (2.4 GHz band). Zigbee - Wikipedia
Compared to the slowest possible wifi on earth (11mbit/s) that is around 44 times less bandwidth
As a homework: How much lower is the highest bandwidth of zigbee compared to the highest bandwidth available wifi (802.11ax) offers?
Sure I do. Adax heaters: FAQ - Adax See section “tips when connecting to WiFi without bluetooth”.
The network you want to connect to must be 2.4GHz, using a 5GHz network will not work. This means that your mobile must be linked to the 2.4GHz band when connecting.
This causes issues when connecting to mesh Wi-Fi networks, which primarily use the newer standard 802.11ac. If the mobile phone that runs the Millheat app is connected to the 5 GHz network, adding a Mill heater to the same network may not be possible.*
One workaround for this this is to temporarily disable the mesh network. If you have a mesh network from AirTies, follow the steps below to install a Mill heater using the Millheat app.
I had the issue just a few days ago, had to temporary disable the 5GHz network to get a device connected.
Which sounds to me like the opposite of what wifi offers
For my ~100 esphome nodes it is as simple as editing the secrets.yaml and hit update-all
Generally my devices have a list of SSIDS/Passphrases and therefor switching wifi credentials on the AP/Router is seemless.
The same would/could be true for zigbee devies which are bridged into a LAN (connected to HA)
I would hate that so much. Isn’t a smart home about to make things easier and not harder? If I would need a manual interaction to “pair” my ~100 devices I would have stopped long ago as this “forced gamification” is just wasted time for me.
Indeed, Zigbee uses less power then WIFI (which uses a lot mostly because of the quite heavy WPAx encryption).
Which is the most expensive energy source for most of the people. I calculated this in the past an calculated a price of over $1000/kWh for coin cells. That’s was more than 1000 times more expensive compared to locally available regenerative energy. And as Zigbee devices are not 1000 times more efficient than wifi devices one actually pays more with this “efficient” devices running from (mostly dirty) coin cells
This is why I try to avoid battery powered devices were possible - not only more expensive to run but at the same time producing ugly waste.
And they just dismiss the lack of coverage in certain area with a poor router, so they extend their coverage with extra APs, maybe even based on mesh technology, instead of actually finding the right spot for their AP to cover it all.
Sometimes extra APs are needed, but extra expensive APs to extend WiFi, just to cover IoT devices that could run on a cheaper Zigbee network. You could probably build your entire Zigbee network for the cost of a single AP.
Well, it is a cheap solution compared to lack of coverage with WiFi. The solution is the same with both technologies, unless you go for a WiFi setup without mesh and wants to pull cables for each AP.
I see them today too, but of course not on smaller simpler networks.
I see them on larger networks where the controllers actively try to manage bandwidth by moving clients from 2.4Ghz to 5Ghz. Many devices still do not act properly when getting winked off by the controllers, even though they announce they have the features available.
I have no issues with my private Zigbee, Z-Wave or WiFi networks. I know how to run them and manage them, but I see many people having WiFi issues, but they just accept the situation and professionally I see lots of obscure devices with WiFi issues.
True, but then you mixing your IoT network with your WiFi. The comment was about splitting it up, which with WiFi would require a complete set of new devices in order to get it split to another frequency.
Power goes to many other things then the radio, like handling a more advanced communication protocol.
The output power of radio to the antenna is in many countries limited to only 100mw.
The 100mw is only when it is transmitting of course, so limiting the transmission time will lower the power usage. The Zigbee protocol does this with a slimmer protocol. The ESP-Now does the same by shredding off lots of the WiFi and TCP/IP protocol, but ESP-Now is in fact based on them. ESP-Now is an attempt to gain the benefit of Zigbee with something that can co-exist with WiFi.
Ahh, you look at the ZigBee Pro frequency, which is hardly ever used.
Zigbee mostly use 2.4Ghz, just like WiFi, just with a slimmer protocol.
Both Zigbee and WiFi can use the 250 kbit/s data rates, but with WiFi more of those 250 kbit/s second goes to overhead for managing the traffic and maintaining the connection than with Zigbee.
With 11Mbit/s you are probably referring to 802.11b.
There is also a 802.11 at 2Mbit/s and 802.11B have 11Mbit/s as the maximum data rate. It have a lot of different lower data rates available of when the communication with a device is not optimal.
All the different WiFi protocols have lower steps of data rates to provide a connection with acceptable quality. An especially the 2.4Ghz frequency band have a hard time reaching the higher data rates today, especially in more densely populated areas.
If you connect your ESPHome 2.4Ghz device, then you will still not get more bandwidth for the data payload than a Zigbee device.
And bandwidth is not important for IoT (except maybe cameras). IoT is time critical. The bandwidth comment was just to shoot down the idea, that WiFi was so superior.
A pure IP protocol will also be better than a complete TCP/IP protocol.
I see this and read this that you can’t connect your 2.4GHz only “Adax” devices to a 5GHz only WIFI AP which obviously makes sense. It does not say anything that it can’t handle the (today) very common mixed mode of advertising 2.4+5GHz wifi with the same SSID
Are you aware that the mentioned 802.11ac is (again) 5GHz only?
Rather sounds to me like an issue with client isolation and/or how the app communicates p2p with the device(s). Any way I personally wouldn’t even bother at all to load some random app on my phone as I like to own my devices completely and not using the (mostly) mediocre to substandard *ware manufactures provide (beside the millheat app is only including 2 trackers but still taking the right to ship your data to third countries world wide ).
Thank’s for your extensive reply @WallyR - I need to admit I didn’t even bother to read your latest post at all as just from scrolling is clear you failed again providing even only one reference that would backup any of your misinformation already posted.
I now stop debunking your false/misleading information here as I consider my time to valuable for this after the couple of attempts I made already - always with the hope the author(s) would improve (and fact check) information before they share any misinformation
Still I hope you take some more time in the future when posting and may even provide one or two hyperlinks
If you don’t believe me that there are issues today (not in the year 2000) with mixed 2,4/5GHz even when I give you examples I really don’t see what more I can do. You should anyhow drop the top down attitude even if you try concealing it with loads of emojis.
No where near the same. Changing this with zigbee is updating a single device HA, or whatever hub you are using.
Your’s is not the average wifi install. Most will end up with an unplanned hodge podge of devices. Even in HA community, I doubt an ESPHome environment is in use by the average user, certainly not a well managed ESPHome environment.
Absolutely and completely irrelevent to me.
Any expense argument falls apart when you consider the expense to wire power to the all the needed locations.
Conservatively retro-fitting my home as wired would be $10K+. No matter how well planned I would probably need a new run a month or two later.
My total battery expense the past 3 years has been less than $60, with enough spare batteries remaining to last another two+ years.
I spend something over $7K/year on power for my home. Battery expense is not even a rounding error.
Even in a new build scenario, it may be hard to make the expense argument (but I’d probably do it anyway).
Regarding the Home Assistant Analytics the ESPHome Add-On is the 7th most used one over all (at this time) and installed by almost 30% of all HA users opting in for statistics.
So you don’t think an average user (not Home Assistant user, an average Wi-Fi user) would have issues connecting a 2,4GHz only device to a mixed 2,4/5GHz network where you actually will have to either disable 5GHz temporary or spilt the networks into seperate SSIDs?
I never specified that you would need to use Home Assistant for the scenario to be applicable, neither did you before you started linking the HA Analytics.
Guess I have been mistaken that you actually were aware of devices (which have the wifi credentials already saved) mostly manufactured before 5GHz Wifi was a thing (that’s around the year 2000) that couldn’t connect at all successfully to AP’s In the very beginning it was therefor very common to have different SSID’s for 2.4GHz to ship around this particular issue. Over time (not all manufactures shipped updates for their devices) the issue became less common because all newer 2.4GHz devices were build with mixed mode AP’s in mind and luckily connect to them with no problems as of today as long they know the wifi credentials.
So long story short: This particular issue probably doesn’t exist of today (more than 20 years after 5GHz was introduced)
No because a Zigbee gateway implementation like the ZHA integration most often uses serial communication to the Zigbee Coordinator (USB-to-Serial radio dongle), so it is directly connected to your Home Assistent instance.
Not saying that ESPHome is not popular but do not mix up add-ons with integrations, not every user have add-addons (as there are not that many), but almost all users have integrations however which ones can differ a lot around the world (as there is a huge amount of integrations) → https://analytics.home-assistant.io/integrations/
As I expected in total there is more ESPHome Integrations (47,561) than the ESPHome (Dashboard) Add-On (45,542). That’s because people don’t need to use the Dashboard to manage/install their fleet but some might be just happy to install something ready-made directly from the browser (like bluetooth proxies or media players) and make use of it in HA
So this makes a HA a candidate to sit in a VLAN with the logic presented by @jerrm if I could follow
That is the job of the router. I have some 5GHz devices in my home and have no difficulty connecting to them from my 2.4GHz devices through the router.
Yes, but the moment you try to onboard (send wifi credentials to) your new device with some sh*tty manufacture app (never did this personally) that uses smart config it does matter.
If your phone is connected to your 5GHz network at that moment then your 2.4GHz wifi “smart” device will never receive the encrypted broadcasts with SSID+Key because they are send on 5GHz.
The Link I posted earlier
has this worded quite bluntly
Your smartphone is connecting to your 5Ghz WiFi and therefore keep broadcasting SSID and password in this radio band. While your smart home device still waits in 2.4Ghz radio band for the required SSID and password to complete pairing.
Due to the fact that they are sending and receiving information in two different bands, they won’t talk to each other and the pairing will fail.
And this is just physic! The same would happen if you try to connect a Z-Device working on 868MHz to a 915MHz one - it will fail. (They just don’t hear each other screaming )
But yea, quite technical matter here - other users in this thread also had big troubles to differentiate
And in case you own your devices it isn’t anything one needs to care about anyways.
That’s obviously expected when your devices are already part of the network.
The same is true for LAN devices as well - no limits talking to wifi devices if not specially set up
Next story for the kids the 
Unlike with Z-infrastructure you don’t need to invest to have one 
Why is that? Don’t you know better or do you actually know better and do this with intention?
That’s was more than 1000 times more expensive compared to locally available regenerative energy. And as Zigbee devices are not 1000 times more efficient than wifi devices one actually pays more with this “efficient” devices running from (mostly dirty) coin cells 
).
) regenerative energies like solar power 
is something what many people luckily want to. 
(They just don’t hear each other screaming 
)