My Zigbee network was a mishmash of different vendors all of which had their own failure rates and quirks, Aqara having by far the highest failure rate and complexity.
My new Ikea (Thread) based setup has had absolutely zero issues so far and fingers crossed it doesn’t start suffering as I scale it out. That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.
I’m taking your “but” to mean “it is acceptable.
I would at least deem it noticeable to wait a quarter second for my light to turn on. May just be my own impatience, but I get an insta-headache whenever I have to wait to find out whether something worked or I have to try again. Every bit of jank is a downgrade in quality of life to me.
Now: May this be due to that specific setup or is the delay somehow inherent to the technology?
Where it starts to get annoying is "door open" and "motion detected" triggers. Motion detected can be played off as a sloppiness in the sensor cone, but going from "instant" to "laggy video game" when you have a physical trigger can be relatively annoying.
Most IoT stuff I own had a good track record. The only stuff that screwed me over was the logitech harmony smart remote.
But I usually pick the more open ecosystems and vendors. E.g.heating is on shelly.
Based on.... 6 devices?
Quite honestly I would have been interested in measurements with more than only 6 devices. Maybe upto 50 or so,even better if they'd mixed different hardware nodes for a more realistic scenario
It's not as fast as Zigbee, not in day to day usage, and not in terms of reconnecting, which often takes 30 seconds (ie. after a power outage) where my Zigbee devices just seem to reconnect instantly. On day to day usage there's a slight delay when turning something on, but it's maybe 100ms or less.
I initially had quite a few problems, but after "standardizing" on a single thread network (I had 3 before for some reason), as well as adding some wired thread border routers, things have become much more stable.
My zigbee to thread is still a "work in progress", replacing devices as they fail (ie. lightbulbs), and I'm also still adding new Zigbee devices like the Aqara T1 Valve controller, but I prefer thread over zigbee today.
One thing I will note, people tend to underestimate the range of thread (and zigbee for that matter). Each mains powered device will function as a repeater just like zigbee, and I initially thought I might need a couple of smart plugs as repeaters, but despite having a somewhat large house (by european standards) as well as double brick walls dividing it, my thread devices have no problems "seeing" a thread border router in the opposite end of the house.
They fix some problems but add more, you endup just like that xckd about protocols
If you're fortunate enough to not be battery constrained at most endpoints and can put a high quality Wi-Fi access point in an optimal location than Wi-Fi is incredibly reliable.
The tooling for inspecting all layers of a Wi-Fi network is infinitely more accessible and mature and that certainly helps; I can't go to My local big box store and get a USB thread dongle for 20 bucks that will just work on a Lennox computer and integrate nicely with Wireshark out of the box...
Wifi for anything but cameras is a mistake, it only exists for maximum compatibility since everyone has wifi already.
WiFi is not designed for lots of low energy devices that can be repeaters.
Two huge notables to me: message throughput for openthreads scales up, zigbee seems to hit a wall early. Not sure when that matters but very clear. The last table was a fright through: it takes half a minute for OpenThreads to recover after a node drops where-as Zigbee a quarter second! Wow.
Wi-Fi has its problems but at least it is easily measurable, debugable, ... Zigbee is a voodoo protocol: you initiate the pairing and hope for the best. And then you hope for the best to have it stay on.
All three of them have their shortcomings. Matter requires an unsecured IPv6 network to operate; I have my doubts about it having any longterm future.
As a result my home automation stack is a mix of zigbee, Matter (over both Wifi and Thread), and just plain WiFi. All of which uses the 2.4Ghz (and 5Ghz but mostly 2.4 for the IoT stuff) ISM band(s) and is thus cheap and plentiful.
Not sure how many other regions suffer the same issues, but I suspect that z-wave will be outcompeted by the more modern alternatives in the coming years.
/rant
https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zwa-2/
https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zst39-z-wave-long-range-usb-sti...
the zooz is this internally: https://www.silabs.com/wireless/z-wave/800-series-modem-soc/...
- WiFi
- Bluetooth
- microwave ovens
Additionally, it’s a bit more strict with certification so you can easily use multiple vendors for zwave whereas with zigbee it’s often a terrible experience since vendors implement things differently in ways that are not as interoperable. In fact, for a device to be certified by the zwave alliance, it must pass strict conformance testing to ensure backwards compatibility and interoperability.
Zigbee is basically the same everywhere, however the 2.4GHz band is of course somewhat congested.
For me, having to wait 30 seconds once every blue moon is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
The automated stuff like "starting at sunrise gradually adjust the lights" might be delayed by 30 seconds. Annoying but hardly rage inducing.
How is Matter (APL2) over OpenThread (BSD-3-Clause) not "open"?
> Matter requires an unsecured IPv6 network to operate
How is this network "unsecured" exactly? Thread IS encrypted and authenticated.
I dunno if its just me, but having a manual override for such important/basic stuff is kind of a must for me. As much as I enjoy smart home stuff, having anything critical only available via that is just stupid.
Fixed link: https://www.mouser.com/en/ProductDetail/Nordic-Semiconductor...
And there’s a little configuration: https://wiki.makerdiary.com/nrf52840-mdk-usb-dongle/guides/n...
You can see it in products like inovelli where zwave is always more than zigbee.
https://inovelli.com/collections/z-wave-light-switches-red-s...
If you limit your pool of zigbee devices to just more reputable companies, you'll end up with around the same amount of options as zwave and they'll be reliable but significantly cheaper.
You also have the option to find some super cheap stuff that works just fine. That usually requires some research but not much. You can also build ESPHome devices for zigbee but that's pretty niche, to say the least.
Having previously been all zwave then moved and tried to go matter but ended up with zigbee, I wish I never listened to people saying what you are. As far as I'm concerned, zwave doesn't know it's dead yet and Matter isn't going to fulfill it's promises because the corporate interests that wouldn't give you local control with zigbee aren't suddenly going to change their minds because it says matter now.
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
HA MoT has a simplified UI, that hides hellish complexity underneath, that's held together by loose pieces of gum, which means its difficult to troubleshoot. HA has a rather laissez faire policy to stability, for example, they rolled out an update just recently that made it impossible to add new devices.
I just readded yday evening my Ikea temp sensors as they mysteriously stopped working for no reason. Why? Who knows, but you can't ship stuff like this to a non-technical audience, especially if they rely on it. I had it connected as the temp sensor of my AC, and was surprised to find the AC was not working, thats how I found out it suicided itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-range_device#SRD860
In the US you also have the FCC reshaping the 900 MHz for industrial broadband and NextNav. So there will be more competition.
https://www.nemko.com/blog/fcc-reshapes-the-900-mhz-band-for...
https://www.landisgyr.com/br/pt/home/knowledge/blog/Navigati...
There's a saying: If you set up a trough, the pigs will come.
Zigbee devices are slow and low power, they cannot access internet directly.
For IPv4 networks you're out of luck. The internal mesh traffic is still IPv6 to the hub and anything crossing into the IPv4 network is done through the hub's IP. No more blocking available unless it's a feature of the hub. I'm not aware of any hub having this kind of FW capability.
Sure you can block it, but then you have a pricey paperweight.
This is not unique to Thread/Matter, they can pull the rug on ZigBee as well, ofc.
Buttons (key presses, remotes - think rapid input), Knobs, sliders, Pixel LED' strips, some MM wave sensors, ir/radio transmitters, really need wifi.
There is products where you will want a bluetooth proxy, plenty of kitchen/grill thermometers and scales for kitchen and bathroom are great examples.
Where range is an issue LoRa is a thing that has plenty of devices and is easy to DIY.
Automatic updates in Home Assistant are disabled by default for a reason. It’s not an ultra polished, safe corporate environment for non technical wives and children.
Which sensor? Battery powered temp/humidity sensor or USB-C powered air quality monitor? I’m asking because the battery powered one is known to be bad. They disconnect and refuse to connect again until their batteries are pulled for ~10 seconds. It’s a device problem, not Thread problem.
I guess a bridge vendor could pull the rug on the antenna ("your Sonoff zigbee antenna is now only compatible with Sonoff zigbee product")(to be clear: they've never done that), but the format is open enough that there's ton of alternative suppliers and open source bridge (the aforementioned zigbee2mqtt).
In any case, I've got a good amount of both Ikea tradfri and Philips Hur bulb and they have never contacted an Ikea or Philips hardware or software of their life.
If you are halfway serious about your home security, you should use ethernet. It's trivial for thieves to jam wifi now.
Now, will they eventually build devices that don't work like that? Maybe.
And in the future, the offline devices might be no longer available, because they stopped being produced. And only new shittier ones are for sale.
So what's your solution to this problem?
I get that enshittification is a real thing but I’d be surprised if it affected smart home devices in the way you are describing.