Comment on Security considerations of WiFi vs Zigbee for self-hosted IoT
ace@lemmy.ananace.dev 1 year agoLots of people instantly think of security when they look at WiFi-connected IoT devices, but oftentimes they never think of the WiFi signal itself - what with all the added communication noise and send time limitations of having lots of small devices.
Especially with regular consumer equipment, it doesn’t actually require that many devices to fully saturate a regular home router or AP.
Especially with regular consumer equipment, it doesn’t actually require that many devices to fully saturate a regular home router or AP.
Absolutely! If you have devices that still only support b/g, they are going to eat up your air time really quick.
Scrath@feddit.de 1 year ago
That’s a good point. Another one I have is sort of failure tolerance. I used to have a really unreliable router which would often crash and could only be reset using a full power reset. While it was in this state, wifi obviously stopped working but my zigbee devices where still available. I used to have a zigbee button linked to a smart plug for toggling my router off and on again.
This shouldn’t be a concern for most people obviously but I wanted to share my experience.
Another point I want to mention is that zigbee works at 2.4Ghz just like basic wifi so they can still interfere with each other.
Zwave on the other hand uses another frequency (I think it was around 860MHz) but is more expensive.
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do you think I’ll be able to use 915Mhz (I’m in the US) for ZigBee devices using the Sonoff controller and IKEA devices/custom devices?
Scrath@feddit.de 1 year ago
Isn’t Zigbee always on 2.4GHz regardless of country? Trying to shift the frequency to 915MHz for all devices sounds like a lot of work with questionable benefit
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Won’t it interfere with 2.4Ghz WiFi?