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I hear a lot about reliability issues with various wifi smart devices.

I've had perfectly lovely reliability with wifi smart devices in my mixture of zigbee/wifi at home, such that I don't really have a preference. Except for one cheap ESP8266-based wifi relay module that had some liquid damage (not the module's fault), and the LED driver in my very first RGBW light bulb finding death after being used for a few years (a common-enough tale regardless of connectivity choice), they seem to Just Work.

It's all semi-random brands of devices, bought over time.

I'm not doing anything particularly fancy with the network itself: It's just a couple of hardwired dual-band Mikrotik access points, with one upstairs at the back of the house and one downstairs at the front of the house (perhaps non-obviously, on non-overlapping channels). A Pi 4 with OpenWRT quietly does the packet-slinging.

Like in many other places, the 2.4GHz band is approximately ruined where I live these days. It's noisy and slow. But it all works well enough to reliably toggle a relay on or off, at least.

Am I just lucky? Are others just unlucky? Or is there an actual pattern here?

[nucleardog]

I’ve tried a handful of WiFi light bulbs, smart plugs, and other things. They were connected to a dedicated 2.4GHz access point (MikroTik as well). WiFi signal was fine—had good coverage (access point was central to the small wood frame house, and checking signal strength at device locations showed a great signal) and I live in the middle of a forest and there’s nothing else within range to interfere. Basically best case scenario outside of a lab or something.

I haven’t had a single device that worked reliably. Some worked fairly consistently, but only after a long (and variable) delay. Many others failed to work often enough that, combined with the delays, the workarounds became the normal way of using things.

At this point I’m running basically everything over Z-Wave (via Home Assistant) and it’s been rock solid for me. Especially with the ability to set up direct associations, things like “this dimmer’s state should be synchronized to that dimmer” are very responsive and reliable, not involving my controller or Home Assistant at all.

Hard to say whether you’re lucky or I’m unlucky—most people having a good experience aren’t going to take to the internet to start a crusade about it—but I do occasionally see someone recommending or saying that Z-Wave or Zigbee has been reliable for them… I think yours is the first I’ve read where someone’s been happy with WiFi.

[ssl-3]

Why sure. It's a rule that people who have the least amount of success with a thing will write the most about that thing. This is why those with their wits about them read things like Amazon reviews with a decent-sized grain of salt.

And yes, you're describing a very quiet environment in terms of outside interference. I'm seriously a little bit envious of that.

One thing that I am doing differently than what you were doing is this: I'm not isolating my smart-widgets to their own wifi access point, as I suspect most people also are not (since "most people" just have a single access point/all-in-one router for everything).

I built my little wifi network to have what I feel is good coverage in and around the whole house, with the intent that all devices (dozens of them) would use that same wifi SSID.

As an unintentional result of this combined network, if/when there's a problem with the do-all wireless network, I'm pretty likely to notice right away because things like my phone and my laptop won't work like they did yesterday.

And wifi problems have happened for me: For instance, before I went 100% Mikrotik, I was using an old once-fancy Asus router with third-party firmware as a combination of access point and switch for part of the house. It became increasingly unreliable as the years ticked on for whatever reason, and always came back to life after a quick reboot, but it eventually would turn stupid again anyway.

And whilst it was being stupid, various things would indeed break: The lights wouldn't turn on/off, or I'd see that my phone was using cellular data instead of wifi, or I'd say "Hey Google" and get "I can't connect to your Wifi" as a response. Madness, insanity. (And then I'd go unplug that router-shaped Asus access point for a few seconds, plug it back in, and things would be fine after a few minutes -- every time.)

But I have not at any time blamed the smart end-point devices (the wifi light bulbs, the switched outlets, the whatevers) for what was clearly -- in my case -- an infrastructure problem. (And having a particular old Asus router-box turn funky isn't indicative of a wifi-specific problem, either -- it's just indicative that this hardware had become increasingly broken over time.)

[nucleardog]

I have two identical Mikrotik devices bolted to a wall beside each other in a closet. One is the WAP serving all of our phones, the laptop I use for work, the laptop my wife uses for work, the TV, the PC hooked to the TV, and everything else. It’s been 100% rock solid.

So my initial assumption is definitely going to be that the nearly identical setup except only serving a handful of low bandwidth devices is going to be just as solid.

That would seem to be a safe assumption given I’ve no noticeable missing data points from the $700 German air quality sensor that I’ve been recording for years and is connected via that access point. It’s moved to various rooms and points throughout the house as demand dictated without issue.

It would seem to be the case given I can pull up a feed from the WiFi IP camera I hooked up and pull it continuously with no latency or dropped frames whenever I want.

If I have an infrastructure issue, it’s one that is curiously selective about cheap IoT hardware while ignoring whatever other random stuff I hook up.

After a decade of installing MikroTik networks in hotels, condo buildings, and office buildings supporting all manner of nonsense you can take my word that there is a strong, reliable, WiFi network connection available at any point inside my house… or you’re welcome to come by with whatever diagnostic gear you’d like and tell me how it’s broken. I’d love to be able to make good use of some of that wifi IoT stuff!

[ssl-3]

I haven't, at any time, doubted your ability to correctly configure an access point.

I'm just trying to find some data points that allow for an explanation of both "Eh, seems fine for me," and "Arrgh! This stuff doesn't work! Into the bin!"

I mean: I believe you when you say it doesn't work for you, for I have no reason not to believe you. And I assume that you also believe me when I say that it does work for me.

What other variables/data points could there be, do you suppose? It's hard, as you probably know, for me to imagine ways in which things can break when they've generally been working fine for me.

One possibly-related theoretical datapoint: My access points are not near eachother at all, on purpose. It is perhaps possible that the chatter from one of your APs was "desensing" (I hate that word, but it's a common-enough word) the front-end of the other AP and that this limits the ability of that AP to receive weak-ass signals from an ESP module (or whatever) in some manner of smart device. (When I do want to isolate wifi networks, like when my neighbor asks if he can borrow a cup of Internet because he's broke this month, I've been successful at creating virtual wireless interfaces that are steered to a particular VLAN -- even as far back as the WRT54G days.)

Another possibly-related data point: I do run my 2.4GHz channels at 20MHz bandwidth instead of 40MHz, because that always seemed to get better performance at a longer distance (not that I think I need that for most little in-home smart widgets, but it is nice to be able to take a wifi-connected speaker into the yard or out by the alley where I work on my car, and to use it without using bluetooth[0] or making my phone into a battery-sucking hotspot and reconfiguring the speaker to use that hotspot instead of the house's SSID).

In doing this, the best available throughput in my neighborhood is not very quick at 2.4GHz -- it's always down into low single-digit Mbps with 20MHz-wide 2.4GHz channels, which quite frankly sucks. But it always seems to work with a fairly consistent level of suck, and that level of suck is adequate (throughput-wise, at least) for what I actually need/want from 2.4GHz.

And, sure: I'd be happy to swing by with a few smart devices that seem to Just Work and one of my rather boring Mikrotik wAP ACs so we could sort it out. Or just share configs with passphrases and SSIDs sanitized? I don't think I'm doing anything special, but perhaps I am? (Perhaps I'm even doing something that is both wrong and stupid, but which lets it actually-work.)

I mean: At the end of the day, I just want other people to enjoy the same pleasure of being able to plug in random stuff and have it generally just behave. I don't think I'm an expert, though: I've got some background in land-mobile RF, have established some rather long links between Ethernet-connected devices using ISM bands (some of which have stood up for well over a decade), and I've been playing with Wifi since Orinoco PCMCIA cards were the new hotness. I think I know a few things, but that doesn't mean that I've got some super-secret sauce or something.

At home I'm just a cheap bastard who wants to automate some things, and who seems to be successful at getting inexpensive things like TP-Link smart plugs, ATHOM light bulbs, random Google/Amazon smart speakers, and trash-tier relay modules to work seemingly-reliably with Home Assistant over wifi. I'd pay more for Z-Wave or something if I felt that I had to do so, but my (perhaps unique) experience with wifi isn't leading me towards Z-Wave. (I also had good "luck" with X10 around a quarter of a century ago: It always worked well-enough to automate reliably as long as I kept everything X10-related far away, wiring-wise, from the beastly Best FerrUPS UPS I was using back then.)

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[0]: Most people would use Bluetooth for this, and they're generally not wrong. But I absolutely hate the way in which Bluetooth breaks when the person with a Bluetooth-connected speaker wanders off with their phone in their pocket and leaves their speaker behind: The audio breaks up in ways that are particularly annoying, but which they'll never, ever hear -- much to the disdain of anyone who does hear it happen. I don't like being that person. If I'm going to play music that the neighbors or anyone else can coincidentally hear, I don't want it to get broken and choppy just because I went inside the house to fetch a different wrench or a beer or something, even if I myself will never hear the problem that Bluetooth use can promote. In this way, slow wifi is better than broken Bluetooth.