Hub/bridge
under review
E
Evan Harris
Spitballing here
One of the features that initially sold me on WiZ was the lack of a hub or bridge. Made setup a breeze.
Now I’m a full convert with the whole house decked out in WiZ, but with some intermittent connectivity problems. I’ve spoken to my ISP (Verizon) who have suggested that this patchiness could be due to the overwhelming volume of smart devices consuming bandwidth (75+).
Got me thinking - an optional WiZ hub that operates using the same Bluetooth signals that the remotes and motion sensors send, but which connects to the internet occupying only one IP address. It would be the best of both worlds!!
Kenny Lam
under review
Antonin Carre
Hi Evan and thanks for the feedback!
First I'd like to take a moment to express our gratitude. It's such an honor, for us who built this system, to get to hear from people who adopted our lights for the whole home! Thanks for your trust, and we hope you keep on enjoying our new products and features! :)
Now, about your suggestion:
- on principle, WiZ devices consume very little bandwidth since the data packets we exchange are extremely light (a few KB each). The largest pieces are our quartlerly firmware updates, and those are only around 2MB
- this being said, there is indeed the question of the router capacity. Regardless of how little they consume, WiZ devices still connect to the router and take up one IP address each. Since every router has a physical limit to how many concurrent connections it can hold, this can eventually reach a limit - not enough room in the router to host everyone, so various devices start to compete for space, resulting in disconnections.
Having some sort of gateway could be an interesting solution, and we'll definitely give it a thought, although it would require quite some effort to add to the system!
In the meantime, we generally recommend our "power users" to opt for more powerful Wi-Fi systems, either with some dedicated piece of hardware (some semi-pro access points can hold 200 connections), or by adopting a Wi-Fi mesh system, which helps distribute the load across the various access points.
Hope this helps!
Oh, and for the little story, we actually don't use Bluetooth in the accessories for now, but instead a form of Wi-Fi broadcast (not on the network) which reaches a lot further ;)
Thanks!
E
Evan Harris
Antonin Carre: hi Antonin - thanks for your message!
You’re correct - it’s not so much about the size of the data packets but the individual IP addresses start to add up, especially with other smart devices sapping what’s left. My understanding is that while in theory there’s plenty available IP addresses, performance starts to suffer well before that capacity is reached.
Good to know re: gateway - will keep that in mind for sure.
Interesting re wifi vs Bluetooth!
Thanks again