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I've all but given up on smart home tech. Almost all of them use the old 2.4ghz wifi band which nothing else in my home uses, and for some reason despite being

by esskay 4y ago

I've all but given up on smart home tech. Almost all of them use the old 2.4ghz wifi band which nothing else in my home uses, and for some reason despite being connected to (any) router that supports both they'll fail to communicate with anything on the 5ghz band. Sure, there are going to be ways around it - but there should need to be. The whole point of this stuff is to make things 'easy', and having to screw around enabling a bunch of legacy settings for brand new hardware isn't 'easy' for the end user.

clbrmbr 4y ago
There are very few IoT chips that support 5 GHz. Espressif finally announced the C5 with dual-band but otherwise all ESP32s are on 2.4 GHz. Thread is 100% 2.4 GHz. Seems the plan is to move high bandwidth applications, and most Wi-Fi users to 5 GHz leaving just IOT devices on 2.4.
cube2222 4y ago
There's not much reason to have 5GHz for smart home devices. 2.4GHz has better range and is ubiquitous. 5GHz has better throughput, but my lightbulb doesn't need 500MB/s of transfer. Most routers will just create two networks with the same name on both frequencies by default, which will work out of the box for 95% of the people. As other commenters have mentioned, usually devices can communicate with each other across those networks without issues.
avianlyric 4y ago
That sounds like an issue with your router. There’s absolutely no reason why a device using 2.4ghz WiFi shouldn’t be able to talk to a device using 5ghz WiFi, with both WiFi networks are on the same logical LAN. It’s not like devices can detect what frequency the other device on network is using, just like it can’t detect if the device is connected via Ethernet, plugged into power, or running on a battery. I would check to make sure your router is properly propagating broadcast packets around your network. That’s the number one cause of smart home discovery fails.

by esskay 4y ago

clbrmbr 4y ago

There are very few IoT chips that support 5 GHz. Espressif finally announced the C5 with dual-band but otherwise all ESP32s are on 2.4 GHz. Thread is 100% 2.4 GHz. Seems the plan is to move high bandwidth applications, and most Wi-Fi users to 5 GHz leaving just IOT devices on 2.4.

cube2222 4y ago

There's not much reason to have 5GHz for smart home devices. 2.4GHz has better range and is ubiquitous. 5GHz has better throughput, but my lightbulb doesn't need 500MB/s of transfer. Most routers will just create two networks with the same name on both frequencies by default, which will work out of the box for 95% of the people. As other commenters have mentioned, usually devices can communicate with each other across those networks without issues.

avianlyric 4y ago

That sounds like an issue with your router. There’s absolutely no reason why a device using 2.4ghz WiFi shouldn’t be able to talk to a device using 5ghz WiFi, with both WiFi networks are on the same logical LAN. It’s not like devices can detect what frequency the other device on network is using, just like it can’t detect if the device is connected via Ethernet, plugged into power, or running on a battery. I would check to make sure your router is properly propagating broadcast packets around your network. That’s the number one cause of smart home discovery fails.