Zigbee Fritzbox

[Basa Benejan]

Ihave a bunch of wifi lights, but they are not always reliable and are neither too responsive. Been looking into actual mesh networks such as Z-Wave & Zigbee (Hue) and I was wondering if they are still relevant today? All the Z-Wave or Zigbee items are almost 2x the price of wifi devices. Is Z-Wave or Zigbee still worth the investment today? Is there any actual alternative to Hue lights?

Yes, Wifi has a number of disadvantages in this space. Firstly, and probably the biggest issue - there is no application standards at the moment. Wifi gives you the communications path, but it does not tell devices how to communicate in a standard way - ie actually how to turn a device on and off. Both ZigBee and ZWave have standards for everything that is done to ensure that all ZigBee bulbs can communicate with any ZigBee switch from any manufacturer.

Hue lights are just ZigBee bulbs - there are dozens of alternative ZigBee bulbs - they are all broadly the same, supporting the same application layer so will communicate with any ZigBee system (including Hue gateways).

i have a lot of wifi devices in my network, but i got the problem that when you have too much wifi devices, the router cant handle so much, i had a fritzbox 7490, but also the fritzbox got problems with more than 40 ore 50 devices, when i was connecting a new sonoff, another device was disconnecting all the time, than i have bougt unifi aps, with this is ok, but this is also expensive to add some good aps, and also these devices has a limited of wifi devices.

So now i almost use zigbee devices, because of the router functions and the possible to handle a lot of devices and also expand it with some router devices, i am extremly happy with that and prefer that now.

what i also like by the zigbee devices, the most use really cheap button batteries, i also used 1 zwave aeotec multisensor, this one has 2 cr123a batteries, they are really expensive and when you have a lot of these devices, it gets really expensive when you need to change all of them, also the battery lifetime by zigbee is really good!

Unfortunately all smart home Wi-Fi devices decided to use the cheaper more interference prone 2.4 GHz band. For instance your microwave oven likely wreaks havoc. If they would use the 5 GHz 802.11a or newer standard they would hsve less range but a more reliable connection.

Battery life among other things has already been mentioned. Since I am a Wi-Fi engineer for a large school I knew to avoid Wi-Fi smart home devices. We only provide minimal support for 2.4 GHz on our campus of over 4000 APs.

i also use zwave, for controlling the heater, the devolo thermostat was the only one that looks nice, they are not so big and ugly things like all other thermostat i found on the market and they use AAA batteries, and i never had problems with zwave since now, but all other zwave devices i have tried has the special batteries i explained bevore, and these are the reason i dont use any other sensors.

because otherwise the costs that are incurred permanently are too high for me.

I use both wifi (lifx, off Unifi APs) and z-wave (mostly Aeotec gear). There are occasionally issues with both, but generally reliable. In fact firmware issues have caused me the most problems (Aeotec Wallmote dual/quad). When my IP network is disrupted - power outages, etc - then the lifx bulbs can occasionally be a bit fractious, but settle down quickly.

I got a new router (fritzbox 7590) which replaced my speedport router. On my old router my HA worked fine. Now I set up everything inc portforwarding (8123 and 443 for duckdns)

Everything works fine including my zigbee devices which are connected with my usb Zigbee stick.

Thank you for your reply. Yes i think thats my problem, Alexa can no longer connect to my HA. I think i used a custom add-on amazon alexa player. But now you mentioned it. I think I got the old tutorial video which I will try

im not sure what im doing wrong, i created a new alexa skill with this tutorial: =dIJiug98PGbAxidH

but in the end my alexa cant find my HA Devices

is there a differnt way to let HA share devices to alexa?

Your limit when it comes to WiFi is your IP range allocated to the network you are using with the main DHCP host and the Access points setup as mesh routers in your setup to extend the range at the time.

Also one wifi device does not put the same load/traffic as another one. Think about you streaming 4k on your mobile producing easily 100 or even 1000 times more traffic/load than a typical esphome node sitting in idle!

First you have a mix of repeaters of different standards, like 2.4Ghz only and 2.4Ghz/5Ghz mixed.

A change from a connection to the 2.4Ghz network on the mixed mode repeater to the 2.4Ghz only repeater will happen when it detect a weak signal on the currently connected repeater and a far better signal on the other repeater. This shift will be quick.

But if a connection is made to the 5Ghz network repeater and the signal is weak, then it can not find another 5GHz signal on the other repeater, so it will try to keep the signal as long as possible and only once it is totally unavailable will it start to look for other signals and find the 2.4Ghz signal.

The bad thing here is that the 2.4Ghz network reach further than the 5Ghz and some network cards prefer to use the same connection point, so it might connect to the 2.4Ghz repeater on the mixed repeater and once it is there then it might discover the better signal on the 2.4Ghz only repeater and switch there afterwards.

Secondly you might also have interference with other networks, especially on the 2.4Ghz spectrum band. 5Ghz is only used for WiFi, AFAIK, but 2.4Ghz is used for WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, RF devices and lots of other stuff, and some of these protocols have seen a rise in usage in the last couple of years too, so you might yourself have installed devices using these protocols and if you have close neighbors then they may also have invested in devices using them.

Moving the 2.4Ghz WiFi frequency might improve its reliability too and moving your Zigbee too might also, if you have such one.

See the overlap picture on this article to see the correlation between WiFi and Zigbee.

Many of your WiFi devices might not even be able to use 5Ghz. This is the fact for many cheap devices and it is only recently that ESP chips for the 5Ghz band has become available, which is one of the chips many cheap devices use.

I did look into the channel setup and overlap with zigbee. I did switch from auto channel to 1 (Zigbee runs on channel 20). This was still very bad. I suppose either my neighbour is using the same or smth else.

The whole point was to avoid having WiFi gear with different standards, because it makes roaming between them problematic.

That means if they buy a WiFi 6E or WiFi 7 AP, then all other APs should be upgraded too.

If you have the option set the wifi from 20MHz to 40MHz for 2.4 and from 80 to 160 for 5Ghz, a wider channel increases the bandwidth but can induce some reduced stability whilst reducing the number of over-lapping channels.

and an openWRT Router for all IoT stuff. I can control the access with the firewall easily and the Xiaomi AX3000T covers the whole house. I might keep it at 20 MhZ, because stability is more important then bandwidth with the IoT. With the Fritz I can not choose the MhZ tho.

En la red local del FRITZ!Box, puede utilizar dispositivos de domtica de otros fabricantes que utilicen los estndares DECT-ULE/HAN-FUN o Zigbee para la conexin inalmbrica, por ejemplo, bombillas led, detectores de movimiento, contactos de puerta/ventana, pulsadores, tomas de corriente, motores de persianas. El estndar de conexin utilizado por el dispositivo de domtica correspondiente se describe en la documentacin del producto del fabricante.

Zigbee tambin es un estndar comn y lo utilizan, por ejemplo, las bombillas de Philips Hue y las bombillas inteligentes de Ikea. Para utilizar dispositivos Zigbee, es necesario disponer de un FRITZ!Smart Gateway, ya que los dispositivos Zigbee no pueden conectarse directamente al FRITZ!Box.

Encontrar una lista de dispositivos Zigbee compatibles y probados con xito que puede utilizar con el FRITZ!Smart Gateway en nuestra pgina web en.avm.de/service/zigbee.

Si utiliza el FRITZ!Smart Gateway y desea registrar sus dispositivos de domtica con l, primero debe conectar el FRITZ!Smart Gateway a su FRITZ!Box y despus registrar sus dispositivos de domtica con el FRITZ!Smart Gateway:

No puede registrar dispositivos de domtica que soporten el estndar Zigbee directamente en su FRITZ!Box, sino solo a travs del FRITZ!Smart Gateway. Primero debe conectar el FRITZ!Smart Gateway a su FRITZ!Box y despus registrar sus dispositivos de domtica con el FRITZ!Smart Gateway:

Ahora el dispositivo de domtica est configurado y podr manejarlo con un interruptor FRITZ!DECT, con su FRITZ!Fon (men Red local > Domtica) o en la red local y a travs de Internet con la aplicacin FRITZ!App Smart Home. Si organiza sus dispositivos de domtica en plantillas, puede configurar un escenario o activarlos/desactivarlos automticamente con una rutina.

I have been if not happy but content Homey user up till week ago Sunday. My setup includes roughly 50 zigbee and 40 z-wave devices. With Z-wave devices have never had any issues but Zigbee-side has been a bit annoyance. For Zigbee, there are 33 routers, out of which 10 are smart plugs. Pain point has been connection from the house to separate warehouse/garage. With careful positioning of (Osram) plugs have been able to conquer the 8 meter distance between buildings. Bought some Tradfri routers to support the mesh better, and it looked very good. Had actually a week without any devices dropping of the mesh (as far as can self detect - flows working as expected) .

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