Let's say you've just upgraded to a Wi-Fi 7 router, but your Netflix is still buffering, and your Zoom calls are dropping. The corporate isn't your internet service provider; it's probably the 40 smart light bulbs fighting for airtime. Wi-Fi was designed for high-bandwidth data, like your phone or laptop, not for sending a 1-bit on/off command from a toaster. Every Wi-Fi smart device you add is a tax on your router's processor.

To save your network and your sanity, you need to move your smart home to a dedicated low-power mesh network like Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread. Alongside the boost in Wi-Fi speeds you'll get, you'll also find that your smart home feels a lot smarter when it runs locally.

You're causing congestion

If your internet feels slow, your smart home might be the reason why

When running a smart home over Wi-Fi, you will likely encounter a technical bottleneck. With so many devices hooked up to your router, you'll experience a "wait in line" problem. Even if a smart plug isn't actually doing anything, it still has to check in with your router from time to time, which will take up your Wi-Fi router's bandwidth. In a house with 50 Wi-Fi devices, your gaming PC has to wait for 49 other smart home products to stop talking before it can send a packet.

You might also experience IP exhaustion. Most consumer routers begin to struggle once they hit 30–50 active IP addresses. Beyond that, you'll see ghost disconnections where devices randomly drop off the map or are consistently connecting and reconnecting to the Wi-Fi over and over again.

Even if you have an OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) router, which is the headline feature of Wi-Fi 6 and 7, this is a high-density solution, meaning the way that they handle hundreds of tiny IoT devices is still fundamentally flawed compared to dedicated mesh networks. This means that, realistically, OFDMA is probably not going to save you here.

The perks of a local smart home

Save yourself the hassle of cloud-based products

Alongside technical issues that you'll experience within your home thanks to your Wi-Fi being congested, you will find that using Wi-Fi smart devices can also come with a range of other issues. Swapping over to locally communicating devices will make your home feel a hell of a lot smarter.

When your devices are dependent on the cloud, they'll experience a latency gap. Your Wi-Fi bulb usually has to talk to a server in Virginia or China just to turn on. If your internet goes down, your Wi-Fi-based smart home just becomes a collection of standard hardware, some of which may not even work. Compare this to Zigbee/Z-Wave, and they feel like they aren't smart devices at all. Local devices communicate with a local hub, meaning if your internet dies, your automations, switches, and sensors keep working perfectly because they don't know or care what the cloud is.

Another downside to Wi-Fi-powered smart devices is that Wi-Fi is incredibly power-intensive. If you pick up a Wi-Fi-based motion sensor or door sensor, it will probably last you a few months on a battery. Zigbee and Thread devices can run on a single coin cell battery for 2–3 years because the connection is just significant. As a result, because these sensors don't need giant batteries or a Wi-Fi chip, they can be smaller and more discreet too.

You'll also find that using Wi-Fi-based smart devices can be a security risk. Every Wi-Fi device is a potential entry point into your main network. If a $10 no-name smart plug has a vulnerability, a hacker can theoretically access your NAS or even your PC.

Zigbee and Z-Wave devices don't have IP addresses. They can't see your computer; they can only talk to your hub, which acts as a secure firewall between your smart home and your actual network. Sometimes, to each other. This creates a significantly more secure network that can't be accessed by outsiders or used as a pit stop on the way to getting into your PC.

Save Wi-Fi for the devices that need it

Your lightbulb doesn't need Wi-Fi

When investing in smart home products, it's worth noting that if it has a plug and stays in one place, it's probably better off being a Thread or Zigbee product. Reserve your Wi-Fi for things that actually need the speed. Not only will your network feel significantly less congested, leading to faster Wi-Fi speeds, but you'll also find a range of other benefits to swapping to local smart home products.

The first step would be buying a universal coordinator like a Sonoff dongle or an Apple TV/HomePod with Thread support, and then starting your migration over to a local smart home.