[naasking]

I'm curious about the Zigbee limitations you're alluding to. Bandwidth is limited for sure, but I would expect a sub-GHz mesh network to be even more limited. The only issue I could potentially see is that a Zigbee mesh might work great when the power is all on, but might suddenly partition once power is cut and some intermediate nodes suddenly go offline. That would be a surprising thing to happen in the middle of a power outage.

[chadconway]

Zigbee is on the same frequency as WiFi and therefore suffers from all the same issues that WiFi has interference and limited range. SolarCity used Zigbee for communication with solar inverters. It was very unreliable. Tesla moved to WiFi after acquiring SolarCity.

[naasking]

Zigbee is sufficiently low bandwidth that interference is typically a non-issue, and repeaters for its mesh network are easy and cheap to add for extending range and dealing with interference. This simply isn't the case with WiFi.