Which Smart Home wireless standard suits me?
- Wlan, Bluetooth and ZigBee at a glance and comparison
Various wireless standards are used to connect individual smart home devices. The products offered by SIRO Smart Life only use one of the three most common wireless standards in the Smart Home area: Wlan Bluetooth and ZigBee.
Which radio standard should you use? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different standards? The 3 standards are presented here:
table of contents
WLAN / WiFi: Without a gateway and with high energy consumption
WLAN is the standard for connection to the Internet and is available in every household. The SIRO Smart Life devices with integrated WiFi module can connect directly to your WiFi router and thus enable control via your smartphone without a gateway.
Advantages for Smart Home
- Thanks to the WLAN available in many households, the devices are connected directly to the WLAN router without an additional gateway.
- Since WLAN has a large amount of data transmitted, the additional data load has little effect on the transmission speed and stability of the network.
Disadvantages for smart home
- Data transmission with 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 alarms, use the WiFi / WLAN radio standard.
- Since many WLANs work in the same frequency range (2.4 GHz), mutual interference can occur in more densely populated areas.
All SIRO Smart Life products with WiFi radio standards are marked with a “W” at the end of their type designation, e.g. the SIRO WLAN connector SL00407W.
You probably know Bluetooth as the wireless connection between your smartphone and headphones or the car speaker system. It is a standard used in many areas for short-range radio, with a distance of up to approx. 50 meters.
Advantages for Smart Home
- The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, specially developed for smart homes, enables data to be transmitted with very little energy consumption, which is very important for wireless smart home devices with rechargeable batteries or battery drives.
- With Bluetooth, smart home devices can communicate with the smartphone even without a gateway, if you do not use remote control. This has the advantage that the data is only transferred internally and is better protected against unauthorized access.
Disadvantages for smart home
- Bluetooth is severely limited in its range, especially with structural obstacles. Inside buildings, Bluetooth only has a radius of around 10 meters.
All SIRO Smart Life products with the Bluetooth radio standard are marked with a “B” at the end of their type designation, e.g. the SIRO Bluetooth thermostat SL02105B.
Bluetooth: Well-known radio standard with little energy requirement
ZigBee: more widely used radio standard with a special network structure
ZigBee is a wireless standard that is widely used in the smart home sector. All devices connected to ZigBee can communicate with each other and thus form a self-managing, so-called mesh network.
Advantages for Smart Home
- The system requires little energy, is easy to operate and flexibly adaptable.
- As an established standard, it is supported by many manufacturers, some of which are very well known, and therefore has many options for extensions.
Disadvantages for smart home
- In the past there were compatibility problems due to different ZigBee protocols, which have now been resolved by using the new version 3.0. The ZigBee devices from SIRO Smart Life only use version 3.0, so that you as a user shouldn’t have any problems with it.
All SIRO Smart Life products with the ZigBee radio standard are marked with a “Z” at the end of their type designation, e.g. the SIRO ZigBee motion sensor SL01604Z.
