Connect home

sort of a newb question…here goes…I already have a standard hub, but then i have two seperate wifi routers in my home that I am not really happy with. I am looking at getting the three pack of smartthings connect home. How will this tie in with my existing hub? also do you find these to work well for wifi in your home etc. I dont want to do away with my existing hub because i have about 50 things connected and I dont want to start from scratch.

You could use the connect home as a mesh WiFi system (only) and keep your current hub in place.

Or you could start over from scratch with your ST setup by moving everything over to the ST hub within the connect home.

i really only want it as a mesh wifi system. I am not happy with the two routers that I have now. Will these also act as a range extender for my smartthings devices

@Jdberry
I haven’t tried the Connect Home, but I just installed a Netgear Orbi router with two satellites, (I chose this because the satellites have ethernet ports which I needed as my Arlo base stations each have to connect to wifi through an ethernet connector). There are several mesh router/satellite options that are cheaper. The Orbi was very expensive, but worth every penny I spent on it.

Brian

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also, do i still need a router for these, or do i just connect the main smartthings unit to my providers switch via ethernet and then connect the other units wirelelssly

In a mesh WiFi system, one of the devices acts as a router, and the others act as WiFi access points. The Samsung connect home isn’t any different in that regard.

So you would plug your ST hub’s Ethernet cable into one of the Samsung connect devices (I don’t own them, so I have no idea if you can plug into any of them, or only the device that is serving as the router).

This mesh WiFi system will not do anything for your z-wave or zigbee devices.

I went to Amazon and did a little research and here is what I think I understand.
I believe that each hub has two output ethernet sockets.
Customers say that Smartthings is built in to each unit, but only the main hub will be the master. The other units will be in the bridge mode. But customers say that each unit has zwave and zigbee antennas built in and can be used as repeaters. That way you may not need other Smartthings hubs.
If true, or if my understanding is correct, that could be pretty nice.

Brian

I don’t have these devices, as I mentioned, but according to prior posts in the community only one device in the mesh WiFi system will have active z-wave/zigbee radios.

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This was my understanding as well. I ordered a 3 pack earlier so as soon as they come I guess we will find out. I plan to replace both my bridges routers now. And I am going to hook my original hub to the third one with an Ethernet chord.

Well, if you’re planning to continue using your current SmartThings hub, and adding the Samsung connect home devices as a mesh WiFi system, then I don’t see how they could act as z-wave/zigbee repeaters.

If you unpair all your devices from your current ST hub and setup a new hub location with the Samsung connect home hub, then it may be that with a recent firmware update, all three access points will serve as zigbee/z-wave repeaters (it’s unclear to me if that’s definitely the case based on what others have reported).

At this point I am more concerned with the WiFi mesh capabilities. The ST hubs are just a bonus. Looks like to get the full benefit that I may have to repair all of my devices to the new hubs eventually. Gosh I dread that. I have quite a few devices.

perhaps there will be a migration tool in the future :slight_smile:

Sweet. I’ll just hold out until further notice.