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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

I wish Zigbee didn’t pollute the WiFi frequency space either. Looks like Z-Wave is my only option, despite it being an inferior, closed protocol. It looks like the home automation community prefers Z-Wave for critical, high availability devices for this reason.

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How is it inferior? Seems better in most ways to me.

* 800-900 MHz only

* every z-wave device works with every z-wave controller

* z-wave signals travel further

* z-wave requires aes-128

* power consumption is roughly the same as zigbee

* z-wave is an open standard contrary to what you say

I heart z-wave. After having worked for a company that was heavily gaming the IEEE standards process I have lost faith in many 'design by committee' protocols. I use Z-Wave at home and it works great. Low power and reliable.

Oh and HDMI as well. I spent at least a year of my life working out interoperability issues for a major DVR mfg. If only HDMI certification had been controlled by a single company...

“Nothing worth having comes easy”, right?

Not all standards are made like utf8, ie commissioned last minute by a committee, written by two guy over the weekend and adopted by committee the week after. Then used by everyone for decades with little to no changes.

Z-wave does not require aes128, it can't even handle multiple messages that well and gets congested very, very easily. The more z-wave secure devices you have the more easily your network gets congested, and god help you if every device also reports their power usage. If you want to remove a device from the network to move it to another network, you often have to go through an explicit dejoin process vs just start a new join process with something else.

Still overall a shit experience.

Your device can't be certified without it to the best of my knowledge.

but it's not required to operate it (you can chose secure or not), and many dont because of the extra overhead and hassle.

It is "open" now. Except the certification process is centralized which gives better ux compared to zigbee

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/z-wave-opens-up-as-sm...

You may want to consider mqtt-based devices like tasmota or shelly, if you prefer off-the-shelf products.

I have a few dozen stock shellies in my apt., all controlled via mqtt. All of them are disconnected from the internet. Works well.

What does mqtt have to do with 2.4GHz spectrum congestion?

It has with proprietary protocols :)

ZigBee isn’t proprietary, It’s an open standard on top of 802.14.5. MQTT is for command and response dispatch; communication with the devices still takes place over a network like e.g., ZWave, ZigBee, WiFi.

The problem is that 2.4GHz is noisy as fuck, regardless of who’s making the noise or how. ZWave is only better because they use 900MHz.

It seems like you know this but just to be explicit; not a damn thing. MQTT rides over TCP, this is like suggesting TLS to fix ethernet broadcast storms.

I do think the suggestion of switching to MQTT nicely illustrates the problem though; even relatively technically inclined people frequently have absolutely no idea how their iot devices work.

Thanks! I will be much more explicit next time and avoid handwaving when offering "solutions". Will go read about zigbee.

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