Which smart home wireless standard is right for me?
-- Overview and comparison of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee
Various wireless standards are used to connect individual smart home devices. The products offered by SIRO Smart Life use only one of the three most common wireless standards in the smart home sector: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee.
Which wireless standard should you choose? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different standards? Here are the three standards:
Table of contents
WLAN/WiFi: Without gateway and with high energy consumption
Wi-Fi is the standard for internet connections and is available in every household. SIRO Smart Life devices with integrated Wi-Fi modules can connect directly to your Wi-Fi router, allowing control via your smartphone without a gateway.
Advantages for Smart Home
- Thanks to the Wi-Fi available in many households, the devices are connected directly to the Wi-Fi router without an additional gateway.
- Since WLAN has a high data transfer volume, the additional data load has little impact on the transmission speed and stability of the network.
Disadvantages for Smart Home
- Data transmission via WiFi/WLAN consumes a relatively large amount of energy, which is why only devices with a permanent power supply, such as smart switches, or devices that rarely send signals, such as smoke detectors, generally use the WiFi/WLAN radio standard.
- Since many WLANs operate in the same frequency range (2.4 GHz), mutual interference can occur in densely populated areas.
All SIRO Smart Life products with WiFi radio standard are marked with “W” at the end of their type designation, e.g. the SIRO WLAN plug SL00407W.
You're probably familiar with Bluetooth as the wireless connection between your smartphone and headphones or car speakers. It's a widely used standard for short-range wireless communication, with a range of up to approximately 50 meters.
Advantages for Smart Home
- Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, specially developed for smart homes, enables data transmission with very low energy consumption, which is very important for wireless smart home devices with rechargeable or battery-powered devices.
- With Bluetooth, smart home devices can communicate with your smartphone without a gateway if you don't want to use remote control. This has the advantage that data is only transmitted internally and is better protected against unauthorized access.
Disadvantages for Smart Home
- Bluetooth's range is severely limited, especially by structural obstacles. Inside buildings, Bluetooth only has a radius of about 10 meters.
All SIRO Smart Life products with Bluetooth wireless standard are marked with “B” at the end of their type designation, e.g. the SIRO Bluetooth Thermostat SL02105B.
Bluetooth: Well-known wireless standard with low energy consumption
ZigBee: more widely used wireless standard with a special network structure
ZigBee is a wireless standard widely used in the smart home sector. All ZigBee-connected devices can communicate with each other, forming a self-managing mesh network.
Advantages for Smart Home
- The system requires little energy, is easy to use and can be flexibly adapted.
- As an established standard, it is supported by many, sometimes very well-known, manufacturers and therefore has many possibilities for extensions.
Disadvantages for Smart Home
- In the past, there were compatibility issues due to different ZigBee protocols, but these have now been resolved with the new version 3.0. SIRO Smart Life's ZigBee devices exclusively use version 3.0, so this shouldn't cause any problems for you as a user.
All SIRO Smart Life products with ZigBee wireless standard are marked with “Z” at the end of their type designation, e.g. the SIRO ZigBee motion sensor SL01604Z.