this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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I see someone replied about security. But I was just taking about stability.
Most people don’t have super beefy wifi routers. Many have whatever shit their ISP sent them. These are fine for your average number of laptops and phones, etc. but if you then throw on 10 more 2.5GHz WiFi IOT devices, you are probally going to run into devices randomly dropping off the wifi, etc.
Additionally, wifi is usually chosen over other protocols by manufacturer due to the cost of hardware and development. So they are often lower quality. (This is only one reason)
But sure, if you have a super awesome 2.5GHz wifi setup and high quality wifi devices, maybe things will work out just fine. But my personal experience with WiFi tells me I shouldn’t clutter my WiFi.
Also, if you were curious, yes: almost all WiFi IOT devices are 2.5GHz only.
2.4GHz*
Whoops! Fixed.
This sort of makes it sound like the advantage of Thread is merely that it's new, and therefore nobody will be affected by having a poor pre-existing Thread setup. If ISPs were sending people Zigbee hubs, it sure would be the cheapest shit available, which could very well translate to similarly terrible Zigbee performance.
I see your point, but there should be much more merit to the specialized IoT protocols than just that nobody has yet flooded the market with terrible Thread/Zigbee devices.
I'm not sure manufacturers choose WiFi because of hardware costs. There are often other reasons (some good, some terrible) for this choice, but I'm certain Zigbee support has to be cheaper; having disassembled plenty of such devices it's almost always a dedicated IC and a tiny PCB trace for an antenna. WiFi support requires a fairly complete TCP/IP stack implementation, basic certificate management etc. which will inevitably require a small SoC; and while prebuilt solutions are plentiful, Zigbee alternatives are an order of magnitude cheaper.
I can imagine software development costs being lower, though, given how every other programmer knows a fair deal about TCP/IP networking, while good comprehension of dedicated IoT protocols is a much rarer skill, there are also much less community resources and open-source solutions available etc.
Thread is the replacement for zigbee.
It's zigbee plus more features.
There is nothing zigbee does better than thread.
Lower power usage, ipv6, standard tls security, not proprietary, etc.