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As the number of WiFi devices on a network grows congestion issues start to take hold. Devices farther away from the AP may have trouble maintaining a constant connection, and low priority IoT devices can reduce signal quality for things like smart phones and laptop.s

To me, an obvious solution is to use the existing HPAV standard, or a similar, simpler standard, to connect smart devices. In theory, one link near your router (which has to have AC power anyway) could bring a large number of switches and plugs onto the network without adding any wireless congestion.

I'm having trouble finding any devices that use this, but surely I'm not the first one to think of it. I know designing safe circuits to interface with mains voltage is hard, but it's clearly already being done in these products. Does anyone know of devices with this operating principle, or a good reason why it would be infeasible?

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  • You know, this is really a great question. For some reason, I seem totally unable to find anything indicating that it exists. I guess a workaround would be to have an ethernet controlled switch and a Homeplug AV device, and have a 6" ethernet cable running between them, but it seems ugly and way more cumbersome than necessary.
    – anonymous2 ♦
    Mar 6, 2019 at 16:09
  • You will need to create something like that IoT switches/plugs using Arduino with an Ethernet shield or directly uses Raspberry PI. If you don't want to use any of this then you probably need to create a whole custom development board switch to work with ethernet cables. See a fully Hard Wired network is created using Arduino, Raspberry PI, and other boards: motioncontroltips.com/delivering-reliable-iot
    – Lucifer
    Feb 17, 2020 at 8:10
  • There may be no congestion as I think the number of devices you want to use is limited and they just want to send and receive data that would be bytes/kilobytes. And it will depend on your router and its capabilities. The IoT is about sensors, actuators, Internet, cloud services, Wireless, wired(rarely depending on the use case), etc. And the world is moving toward wireless so why you want to go back to old ages where you will see ugly wires here and there.
    – Lucifer
    Feb 17, 2020 at 8:10
  • Assuming people want more and more IoT devices over time eventually congestion is inevitable. Using existing line-voltage lines for communication for devices which have to connect to line voltage anyway allows those devices to communicate without using any bandwidth or running any cables.
    – Andrew C
    Feb 18, 2020 at 19:47
  • As you said over time usability of IoT devices will increase, and with time Routers will also improve so there will be no congestions. It all depends on how you implement the architecture of the IoT system in your environment. And also cisco is working on creating routers and other devices especially to handle and work for IoT. Whatever you feel like implementing you can proceed with it.
    – Lucifer
    Feb 20, 2020 at 9:43

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