I guess since the EP32 does not support it and you need a compatible router you are stuck with normal WiFi.

Go for 3/9 or something in between which would get noise but not significant.

You'd be doing more damage yourself, 120 IoT devices would be kind of fragile if noise is introduced.

Also seems like some minor changes could avoid the issue entirely. I live in a large building amongst other large buildings and depending on which way the wind is blowing I can see over 100 wifi access points, not to mention devices.

First of all: the linked page doesn't scroll on an iPad - they are trying to be clever with scrolling and it actually breaks scrolling.

Secondly: they take pushing their app to an insane level: none of the links works, they all point to 'Get the app'. This fact alone has just gained the site a place in my DNS blackhole.

Archive.org link - that actually works better than the original site: https://web.archive.org/web/20210420050504/https://devrant.c...

I've seen people tell me to get a 5GHz capable AP and a dongle. But this shouldn't be needed. I already own a hAP AC3 (MikroTik) but to the way our house is built (it's pretty much all solid brick between each room), 5GHz doesn't go that far, so I'd need to buy an AP for pretty much every room. When sitting behind my desk (about 2M from my AP), everything is fine and dandy but when I leave the room, 5GHz basically dies.

Next, I saw people recommend "working it out with my neighbours" by having them turn down the power or use cables to hook up all the APs (I even offered to pay for all the cabling myself), but they are not willing to do so. And just saying "Would you stop using all this smarthome junk so we can have a decently working wifi" also isn't really gonna cut it for them.

And finally, I saw a comment or two to just jam the living shit out of it, but well... I'd rather not get my own ass into legal trouble for this.

My laptop picked up about 140 AP's from the couch. I could copy files from my NAS over Wi-Fi at a blistering 6KB/s! Sometimes bursting to 25KB/s

It's an expensive, possibly inconvenient solution, but from the perspective of RF spectrum it has a high probability of success; your 2.4 GHz neighbor is unlikely to appear at 6 GHz for some time, and even then the reduced 'range' of 6 GHz will work in your favor.

1. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/wi-fi-6-devices-top-compa... (the distinction between 6 and 6E is crucial; you want 6E)

Usually there are regulations that state your radio devices can't interfere with someone else's. It doesn't matter if they are off-the-shelf type approved devices, you still have to operate them responsibly.

I live in Ireland and there are have a few cases where the local regulator ComReg has intervened when someones wireless networks and devices affected others.

Our flat is top of the building, we can assume middle is even worse.

We use 5GHz for our WiFi needs which does not penetrate through walls as readily which means we only see 3 other APs.

You would only want the shielded variant on your exterior walls & upper floor ceilings. All you would need to do is make sure you clearly label/color the shielded vs non-shielded drywall appropriately so the construction crew doesn't get em mixed up.

Of course I run my own network and do those steps my self. (they were nice enough to give me a port with a public IP). Ethernet is still king for many critical but WiFi seems great despite there still being 35+ SSIDs around.

TBH most SSIDs you see have so little traffic 90% of the time so I can't imagine they would decrease the SNR that much (e.g. printer setup networks...) My guess is their neighbor in this case does have a lot of traffic besides the IOT. # of devices and heavy usage just tend to corelate for obvious reasons.

Wifi 6 also brings OFDMA which will let stations use much less of the channel at a time (instead of a 20MHZ+ chunk they can just use 2MHZ while other stations use the rest). 2.4GHz being stuck on old Wifi 4 (or worse) devices hasn't helped the situation.

Since 2.4GHz penetrates through walls quite well this has the added benefit of limiting the radius of the coverage and to some extent improving security. But this is not a perfect solution (it's more like an unintended side-effect).

The 5GHz band has lower penetration through walls so leaving it on highest transmit power should be fine.

I found the following article and its comments to be quite helpful: https://metis.fi/en/2017/10/txpower/

I have 3 music receivers (for android casting), 7 TVs, weather station, coffee maker, fridge, google home controlled lights (40ish), and other stuff all hardwired. A lot of which I had to modify or build the controllers myself to get them off wifi. The lights all run off POE.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/splice-connector-ideal-85-925-jelly...

Get an agreement with your neighbor.

You could have shared mesh network, each (you, neighbor) with it's own vlan. You both win, great coverage and bandwith for both, and your AP's wouldn't fight (and cheaper too, since you need less overall AP's).

If talking is out, then you are only left with suboptimal options. Depending where you live mobile 5/4g might also be an option.

Not that powerline doesn't work (sometimes), but it radiates and raises the noise floor for all sorts of frequencies, pretty much by design.

It's a bit different on distinct but overlapping frequencies, since detecting a busy medium has to happen on the physical rather than the MAC layer, but if both APs are on the same frequency (and supporting the same maximum speed), the number of APs and SSIDs is mostly irrelevant.

This might change a bit when thinking about MU-MIMO, but I doubt that 2.4 GHz only IoT devices support that.

Not once, since then, have I heard of any of them pulling new cables.

Unfortunately, the hardware failed, and I didn’t see mass adoption of 60Ghz elsewhere. I hope that tech like local optical or 60Ghz becomes viable.

e: The study you linked is also a decade older than the type of construction we're talking about :)

In most areas, the modem rental is $14/month. Adding unlimited is $11/month, for a total of $25/month.

In most areas, adding unlimited to your own modem is $30/month.

Thus, in most areas, switching to your own modem with unlimited costs $5/month more.

Not all standards are made like utf8, ie commissioned last minute by a committee, written by two guy over the weekend and adopted by committee the week after. Then used by everyone for decades with little to no changes.

I do think the suggestion of switching to MQTT nicely illustrates the problem though; even relatively technically inclined people frequently have absolutely no idea how their iot devices work.

But from a theoretical point of view, it need not be.

Older chicken wire for internal walls (ie pre-drywall) is the problem at 5GHz (and I'm sure to a lesser extent at 2.4GHz)

Also circa 1kW not a safe thing to be spraying around, I think fleshy things might well be damaged.

I'm all for 5ghz, but where are you getting an AP and dongle for $50?

Edit: To clarify, I'm skeptical, but if you're serious then links and/or model numbers would be appreciated:)

The fridge, washer and dryer have integrated IoT but there'd be little point running just these over power lines.

No. Most devices will still work just fine on Cat 5e for another 10-20 years, running at 1gbps. Cat 6a, running at 10gbps, will be fine for residential for another 25-30 years.

Putting fiber in the walls is an expensive overkill. If you are worried about future proofing, just install conduit with cat 6a.

The vast majority of homes, at least in the US, are nowhere near 1 Gbps internet service, and of those, many are coping with poor WiFi.

Would it? "Regular" Cat5e has been around for 20 years or so now, and even at "just" 100mbps to 1 gigabit, would be a ridiculously huge upgrade for any home I've ever been inside of, and is still reliably faster than any WiFi device invented thus far.

Unless you have some really esoteric requirements, most homes could just run CAT6a to every room without thinking about it, and sleep soundly knowing they'll reliably get 2 to 10 gigabit (depending on distance) into each room for the next 30 years or so.

And the benefit is tenuous. CAT6a/7 can hit 10Gbps, as long as the run length isn't insane. Even the 11th gen Intel NUCs ship with 2.5Gbps ethernet LAN ports, on-board; outfitting your endpoint devices to breach 1Gbps is far cheaper, especially considering most won't ever breach 1Gbps due to hardware limitations (PS5/Xbox? Ikea Tradfri Gateway?).

Even in the "local network upload/download" case; you've got a server, and you want 40Gbps to that server. Building a file server capable of sustained 40Gbps transfer rates is... insane. Its not easy, nor cheap. It requires multiple PCI-E attached NVME drives in RAID-0, on the latest-gen TR/EPYC platform (for their PCI-E lane count, maybe Xeon is good enough nowadays as well). In 2021, this is still in the realm of "something Linus Tech Tips does as a showcase, with all the parts donated by advertisers, and it still sucks to get going because Linux itself becomes the bottleneck". Remember: A Samsung 980 Pro NVME Gen4 ($200/TB) can sustain somewhere around 6Gbps read; you'd need 6-8 of them, in a single RAID-0. And, realistically, you'd want 12-16 of them in RAID 0+1. A server capable of this is easily in the mid-five-figures.

(and, fun fact, even after you build a server capable of this; Windows Explorer literally cannot transfer files that fast. you have to use a third party program.)

If you're a millionaire outfitting your mansion, then sure, maybe fiber makes sense (due to both upfront cost and length of the cable runs, where sustaining 10Gbps on CAT6a/7 is more tenuous). But I think the assertion that Cat6a/7 will be "obsolete" by 2030 is pretty crazy. Yes, technology will continue to get cheaper and more accessible, and I do think we'll see more fiber providers in tier 1 and 2 metro US areas offer wider 2Gbs and 5Gbs connections, but CAT6a/7 is perfectly capable of saturating this. Just ask yourself: Do you really predict that the PlayStation 6, maybe 2028, will have a duplex fiber port on the back, instead of ethernet? Its 2021, and Microsoft's Xbox download servers can't even download game data at gigabit speeds; they rarely breach 250-500Mbps.

Given the niche that fiber lives in, even taking the position that "its just dual-channel light, one up, one down, nothing can travel faster than light, its the perfect future-proof tech" is tenuous. Whos to say that, in the next twenty years, a consumer standard for fiber is developed which runs quadplex (2 up 2 down)? Or simplex (because its "good enough")? Or the connectors are totally different (which would be the easiest to switch because it may not need new cable runs. maybe).

Oh, also: PoE! PoE is freakin fantastic for prosumer setups. and only available on copper. You can run copper to areas around your house where you want security cameras or other smart devices, and not have to worry about also running power.

I think it's safe to assume that 80+ wireless devices puts you in the top few percentiles. So while not unheard of, not "normal" exactly. And even less common in dense apartment environments where having more than 3-4 rooms is unusual.

Having said that, if I had the money, I'd totally automate everything in my house as well. It's just too much fun not to.

Some of IoT device you list I’d actively avoid, but thinks like robot vacuums is really useful.

I've heard crazy stories about home installers and contractors that didn't really know what they were doing. Everyone starts somewhere, and it's not always with our own home nor with a mentor that actually knows what they are doing.

Or, it's just some person that did it for their own home but went way too far and when they finally got it working (sort of) decided they really didn't want to touch it again for a while, because it was a pain.

Truthfully, either of those sound kinda likely to me.

The number of clients should not be an issue, the half-duplex shouldn't be as well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBt00CVvMBA

I.. ahh, don't think so.

I graduated from Software Engineering in 2003, and recently worked for Canada's biggest Telco for 4 years. I didn't even know half of the IoT's on your list even existed !

It's definitely not normal.

I don't feel the need to have a single "smart" light bulb or outlet. If I'm turning a light on or off, it's because I'm leaving or entering the room, in which case I'm walking by the light switch anyways.

Of course, the first thing I would make sure is that they don't connect to the internet or any wireless network. So I can't imagine the ones the GP is talking about being anything other than a privacy nightmare.

By the way, what happened to data over electricity wires? It's the obvious way to set the home automation stuff.

They have backup batteries and form their own mesh network which works independently of the main WiFi.

If the central unit disappears, the detectors still all go off if one is triggered. (Central unit offers app interface and optional 4G fallback network connection.)

But knowing the state of IoT they'd probably take 3-5 seconds after turning on to negotiate connection since the power had been cut, and they'll default to blinding white at full brightness during that time.

That aside, I fail to see any reason why any user would want their cook top to be accessible via an app.

On the contrary, if the cook top is switched on, I very much prefer to be in the immediate vicinity.