This is Technology Bytes, episode 180 for August 16th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I want to talk about smart home devices.
Yeah, I guess smart home devices, but I’m really focused on how they interact with the current Wi‑Fi standards.
And so what happens is a little bit frustrating, and I’ll get into that as I get into this podcast.
But the general realities of devices that connect to your home network is that almost all of them connect on the 2.4 gigahertz Wi‑Fi band.
So Wi‑Fi has all kinds of bands, and now they’ve, you know, kind of gone away from some of the technical aspects of it and just given them numbers like Wi‑Fi 5, Wi‑Fi 6, Wi‑Fi 7.
And so in my house, I use a Deco mesh system that has three bands, a 2.4 and 5, and then a 6.
Now the 6 I basically use for the backhaul because I don’t have all of my mesh units connected to each other with a wired connection.
And so I use the Wi‑Fi 6 as the backhaul for all of my devices to talk to each other, and then I use the 2.4 and the 5 to talk to the devices that are in my house.
The problem that I run into is that when I’m at home and I have a new iPhone, then my iPhone is going to connect to whatever Wi‑Fi is available to it at the highest level, let’s say.
So if I have a 2.4 and a 5, then it’s going to connect at 5.
I think my Wi‑Fi actually has 6 in it, so it could connect to my 6 even though I’m using that a little bit differently.
But all of my Wi‑Fi devices, my smart plugs, my— Smart doorbell, you know, you name it, they all want to talk on the 2.4 gigahertz band of my Wi‑Fi.
And so what happens because of, I don’t know why.
Is it just the trouble of trying to do it set up, do the setup?
But the devices often don’t understand the difference between the 2.4 gigahertz and the 5 gigahertz band, and they often don’t see the 2.4 gigahertz band if your phone, which is being used to help the smart device connect to your Wi‑Fi, is not also on that same band.
And it becomes quite problematic.
So what I have to do in my house when I set up a smart device that is in that realm, and there’s a lot of them that do that, in fact probably most, I have to take my routers and turn off the 5 gigahertz band so it only runs on the 2.4 so that my phone connects to the 2.4.
Then I have to start up the process for getting my smart device connected to my Wi‑Fi network, and then it can talk to my phone because now my phone is on the 2.4 gigahertz band because the 5 has been turned off, and then I can set up my device.
Who knows how to do that?
Who understands the routers in their home enough, and who can even make that change?
There’s a potential that, you know, whoever is your internet provider also is your router provider, and they provide the Wi‑Fi signal, and you don’t even know how to make that change or if you even have that capability.
And so setting up Wi‑Fi.
Smart devices is very difficult for a general populace.
I really like my smart home stuff.
I really like how it works.
I like to be able to talk to the air and get things to happen.
But it’s still a very niche, a very difficult, a very nerdy proposition to get these things set up often.
So I have a—the reason this all came to be is I have a smart doorbell that decided to disconnect from my smart world.
Whatever reason, I can’t quite figure it out.
This isn’t the first time.
I don’t know why this one has this problem, but it could be built into the fact that you’ve got these different wireless radio frequencies that are causing problems.
So I purchased a new smart doorbell, and I don’t have it yet, but I’m wondering if any of this has changed.
Most of my smart stuff is fairly new—I mean, fairly old.
I’ve had it for some period of time, and so this will be an interesting thing to see if anyone has figured out how to do this.
Now I know my Deco—I just updated the firmware, and it talks about being able to tell a device where your, you know, what radio you need to talk to and other things like that, and that’s all well and good, except that if my phone isn’t talking to the same network, the same frequency as the smart device that I’m setting up, it’s still not going to set up correctly because my phone isn’t talking to it across the same wireless network.
So as many things have been done with Matter, with Thread, with all of these things that help devices be more— Available to the different home networks, be it Apple, be it Google, be it Amazon, whoever, we still have a big problem of someone making these smart devices actually smart and the ability to have them.
Okay, so we only want to connect to 2.4, even though my phone is connected to 5.
It’s smart enough to understand it’s on the same SSID, and the device can still be set up.
So until this gets to be more common or easy or whatever the word is, I’m out of words, I guess.
But until the regular person can buy a device and set it up and make it useful, smart homes still become the realm of the nerdy.
Not that I’m going anywhere.
I love what I have.
I like helping my daughter set up her stuff.
My son doesn’t need my help.
He does it all on his own.
But if this is going to grow and if we’re going to get into an environment where our homes are smarter and smarter, then even AI is not going to help with that.
It might be able to walk you through it, but it can’t do it.
It can’t set up your stuff like that.
There’s still a lot of work to make smart homes available to everybody, and I hope somebody is paying attention.
That is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@marriagfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
