2.4Ghz band Zigbee, WIFI, BT, Microwave, Cordless Phones Interferences. What Zigbee channel to pick?
2.4Ghz band Zigbee, WIFI, BT, Microwave, Cordless Phones Interferences. What Zigbee channel to pick?
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Kicking off this section with a quick write up on Zigbee 2.4GHz channel utilization.
Zigbee has become a very popular protocol over the past few years mostly due to its low power consumption, low chip cost (not being proprietary like z-wave was) and ease of inclusion.
It does come with a couple of downsides however ranging from single controller topography (aka single PAN coordinator) to what the title says: It uses the 2.4GHz (ISM) band which is possibly ultra saturated by other wireless protocols and even a variety of other more or less proprietary zigbee stacks. (i.e philips hue, Ikea Tradfi, Xiaomi, Plantlink etc...)
It is therefore important to make sure they don't interfere with one another.This is a good article showing the correspondence between Zigbee and WIFI.
https://support.metageek.com/hc/en-us/articles/203845040-ZigBee-and-WiFi-Coexistence
Interferences lead to range reduction, dropped packets, more retries and lags. I have a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer I can post some results from. I read through the zigbee alliance presentation claiming low interference but my experience demonstrates quite the opposite. When I was using SonosNET and Hue at the same time on neighboring channels, playing SONOS would kill the philips hue network.