For integrating a connected home, Wi-Fi is seen as a ubiquitous choice. It’s good to have them with a secure Wi-Fi pairing. That can easily go with your existing home router and you don’t have to buy a separate smart hub to add the devices in.

But Wi-Fi also has its limitations. The devices that run solely on Wi-Fi need frequent charging. Think of laptops, smartphones, and even smart speakers. Besides, they aren’t capable of self-discovery and you have to manually enter the password for each new Wi-Fi device. If for some reason Internet speeds are lower, it can turn your entire smart home experience to a nightmare.

Let’s explore the relative pros and cons of using Zigbee or Wi-Fi. Knowing these differences is crucial as it can greatly influence your purchase decisions for specific smart home products.

1. Power Consumption

Zigbee and Wifi are both wireless communication technologies based on the 2.4GHz band. In smart home, especially in whole house intelligence, the choice of communication protocol directly affects the integrity and stability of the product.

Comparatively speaking, Wifi is used for high speed transmission, such as wireless Internet access; Zigbee is designed for low-rate transmissions, such as the interaction between two smart items.

However, the two technologies are based on different wireless standards: Zigbee is based on IEEE802.15.4, while Wifi is based on IEEE802.11.

The difference is that Zigbee, although the transmission rate is low, the highest is only 250kbps, but the power consumption is only 5mA; Although Wifi has a high transmission rate, 802.11b, for example, can reach 11Mbps, but the power consumption is 10-50mA.

Therefore, for the communication of smart home, low power consumption is obviously more favored, because products such as thermostats, which need to be driven by batteries alone, power consumption design is quite important. In addition,Zigbee has an obvious advantage compared with Wifi, the number of network nodes is as high as 65,000; Wifi is only 50. Zigbee is 30 milliseconds, Wifi is 3 seconds. So, do you know why most smart home vendors like Zigbee, and of course Zigbee is competing with things like Thread and Z-Wave.

2. Co-existence

Since Zigbee and Wifi have their pros and cons, can they be used together? It’s like the CAN and LIN protocols in cars, each serving a different system.

It is theoretically feasible, and compatibility is worth studying in addition to cost considerations. Because both standards are in the 2.4ghz band, they can interfere with each other when deployed together.

Therefore, if you want to deploy Zigbee and Wifi at the same time, you need to do a good job in channel arrangement to ensure that the channel between the two protocols will not overlap when they work. If you can achieve technical stability and find a balance point in cost, Zigbee+Wifi scheme may become a good choice Of course, it’s hard to say whether the Thread protocol will directly eat both of these standards.

Conclusion

Between Zigbee and Wifi, there is no one better or worse, and there is no absolute winner, only suitability. With the development of technology, we are also happy to see the collaboration of various communication protocols in the field of smart home to solve various problems in the field of smart home communication.