10 times the power!? OMG, had no idea there was such a difference.
@johnr 's setup is unusual, and not typical of home automation installations. He lives in a rural area and doesn’t have to worry about interference with neighbors. He is using “pro” zigbee devices designed for long-range use with range of about a mile. They are typically used for outdoor applications, including small drones, but also automatic gate controls, agricultural irrigation system controls, and outdoor sensors.
I would think only a few other SmartThings customers would be using those as repeaters. 
Zigbee takes signal strength into account when choosing message routes. So if the zigbee bulbs connected directly to the hub are problematic repeaters, The problem could be avoided if there are other repeating devices nearby with stronger signals, as then it would be rare for a bulb to be chosen as a message carrier even though it was identified to the network as a repeating device.
In John’s case, I think that’s definitely coming into play. For people using more conventional home automation devices in the US, I still think it will be possible to select repeating devices that would be a higher signal strength than the bulbs.
That might also explain why some customers are reporting problems with lost zigbee messages and others are not. It might not be the end devices that matter, but rather which repeaters make up the network backbone. In order to get The network to not use a directly connected bulb as a ZHA repeater, there needs to be another repeating device of a stronger signal nearby.
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I spent a bit of money and a lot of time trying to debug my setup here as outlined in my main thread. Never got around to buying a usb stick to actually map the network but was close. I bought 4 smart outlets, 1 ST 3 iris, to try to improve the network here. Not going the ‘pro’ route but at least everything ST suggests to do to improve your mesh. I dont have a huge house, 2200 sq/ft but hell really its only like 1700 is where I live in and have devices, well even less than that because its 3 bedroom and I live alone. So you could say probably like 900sq/ft of used space. I littered the house with those ‘repeaters’. To the point I breadcrumb’d them from the hub around the corner to the kitchen. Each outlet is like maybe 15’ apart and line of sight from each other, and thus back to the hub. That has to be the best case for setting up repeaters, that did nothing to help my issues.
My first issue a year ago was my outside garage smart lights. Well I figured out that my neighbors smart meter for our power company is zigbee and about 10ft from my garage so yea that was not going to go well as we all know. So I pulled those and went to my first zwave switch. At that point my zigbee setup was great. But only a few devices. Started buying more and thats when things started breaking. I started experimenting with repeaters at that point. Months went buy with nothing but trouble.
Got an offer from a user here for a dirt cheap hue hub and since then its been golden. I’m not an automation engineer, but I am a life long IT person, linux sysadmin and networks for 15 years now. So I’m not exactly the typical user, probably typical forum user :). But I did my homework. Things like doing a wifi survey here. So knowing that all the competing wifi around here is in the channel one or 6 areas and zigbee lives higher up than that, I dont have much of an issue with wifi interference. I have the super strong netgear nighthawk r7000 and hell it sits beside my hub. Ive proven that even me moving my st hub to the middle of the living room far away from the router, did nothing to improve my bulbs reliability. The few motion sensors I had at that time didnt have any noticable issues, same with the smart outlets.
The tipping point was when I removed all the bulbs from ST down to less than 12 bulbs. I think I’m at like 10 now. The rest are on my hue hub. Since then its been very stable. I’m not sure the cree bulbs ever used the smart outlets as repeaters since zha vs zll. One thing that I think needs to be called out in the documentation is that difference in zigbee bulbs vrs different zigbee devices. The repeater document is pretty good, but lead me down the road of spending like 250 dollars trying to improve what I thought was an interference issue, that in my mind is a definite bug
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Holy crap! You just solved the only mesh problem I’m having! I have a back porch light of the side of the garage. I had a link bulb out there connected to ST… Never would work. I changed it to a hue bulb and still no better. I had pretty much written it off.
On the sections floor at that end of the house is my master bath. I had a ton of trouble with my zigbee devices in there. Then I put in three hue bulbs and everything is great.
Except for that one bulb.
Related aren’t even helping it.
I completely forgot about my electric meter being a smart meter. So, it’s going to be changed to a zwave switch.
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LOL omg dude… yea I fought with 2 Cree connected’s and my Osram gardenspots for weeks. One day I was getting out of my car talking to my dad on the phone. So started walking around just not wanting to go inside yet. I kinda started strolling over to the neighbors house. When I barely saw the zigbee logo on the meter. I was like, holy shit. 15ft max between how our houses sit, and line of sight.
Went to Lowes and got a zwave switch. 0 issues since. Hell my Osram’s started working just fine as well. So I think it somehow chained over to them even tho they were at my front door like 50ft away.
My meter doesn’t show a zigbee logo so I dont know if mine is or not. I know dude doesnt get out to read it so it has to be something. All these houses were built around the same time, 2007ish so Id suspect they all got similar meters.
My bitch is that a smart switch is 35 dollars, and a bulb is just 14. So I cant justify every switch. Then add to the fact that I have ‘fancy’ switch covers in the toggle style. So I am limited to one switch type or I have to replace every switch cover in the house. I did the math, thats like 500 in switch plate covers to go to decora style paddle switches and such. I got this house with the pretty covers, so kinda dont want to replace them all. Tried selling them local at like half price. Hell they are still sold at Lowes so its not like you cant get more if needed.
Good luck @bamarayne hope going to zwave fixes ALL your issues 
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I have at last reached a point of some stability in my zigbee network. Unfortunately I embarked on the transition of moving away directly connected osram bulbs at the same time as the last hub update. It is therefore inconclusive whether the last hub update which contained some zigbee update or my changes have yielded the positive effect I’ve seen on my network.
I’m betting on my move of the bulbs into hue at the moment. Thanks @KevinH for the tip. This is the first 48 hours that I’ve not had to reset a stuck ST sensor in months! (Yes, my stability was that bad!!)
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That’s a great question to ask Philips how they do it. I have more than 30 bulbs connected to their hub and at least half don’t have power during the day and near 90% don’t have power overnight, yet I didn’t lose any bulbs or had any problems in well over a year.
OMG…I am still trying to figure out which of my neighbors has a super powerful network with several extenders and Almond HA connected devices that is set to automatically pick the best channel. It messes my system up once in a while. I wanted to go knock on their doors to make a deal with them to set up our routers on different channels but I never did it. And believe it or not, is neither of my next door neighbors. I think it’s a small business office that is at the end of my back yard. But boy screening and selecting channels was fun and challenging.
Seriously though, this is one thing people don’t realize how significant channel interference impacts ones system. I know ST has issues, but many times they get blamed for issues that relate to being unfortunate to have a neighbor like @JohnR
@bobby what exactly do you have a problem with? I would normally let comments like this just slide. But the tolerance for the ignorance just gets to a point of breaking and I have to push back every now and then. My network is within the ZigBee specifications? So what is your technical grounds to for this comment?
You completely kill power to your bulbs? Not just turn them off? Why?
Was a joke, there is nothing wrong with how you do things. All the merit goes to you. The problem is, that some people don’t take in consideration their own local environment and come yell at ST for being unreliable.
If my power goes off overnight, I don’t want the bulbs to shine in my eyes when it comes back. As for during the day, why waste electricity…
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I think people need to keep in mind that the 802.15.4 spec (ZigBee is based on) is designed to work when multiple networks are all on the same base frequency. Just because two neighbors have hubs on the same frequency and live close to each other doesn’t mean they are going to interfere with each other. Sure if both neighbors had hundreds of ZigBee devices the usable bandwidth would go down but ZigBee is designed to handle that. I just want to caution people from going on witch hunts just became they see a ZigBee logo on their neighbors power meter.
I often wonder if the problems people are seeing when they have Hue bulbs attached to their SmartThings hub directly is more on the processing power of the bulbs than on the RF contingency side. I’m basing this on my observations back when I was sniffing my ZigBee network. I have not proven any of this. But the ZigBee mesh is dynamic, the routers are constantly fine tuning their preferred route. The preferred route is based on several factors but basically a router has to respond to a request and say yes I’m here, here are my neighbors (other ZigBee devices), and here is the quality of signal from each neighbor. This is repeated over and over by each router and if a router doesn’t respond then it will not be included in the path of any of the routes. This is what appears to happen with my Hue bulbs. Sometimes they would respond with their neighbors and signal quality and other times they wouldn’t. So to take them out of the path for routing I put more routers in my network so the bulbs wouldn’t be critical path. This is just my observation of how my Hue bulbs (they are about 3 years old now) performed two years ago. Things may be different with the newer bulbs.
When you have the ZigBee bulbs connected directly to the Hue hub they are connected to a Light Link profile and I bet there is a lot less traffic the bulbs have to deal with.
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When I redesigned my set up, I came to the conclusion that ZLL is best handled by HUE hub, so I put all of my lights on it and designated a separate channel that doesn’t come near my ST’s preset zigbee channel. Don’t know which of the methods worked better (having all ZLL on one network or having Hue on a different channel) but I know I’ve had less issues with ST and no issues with HUE since I’ve done that…
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I agree with @johnr , if your neighbor’s installation is interfering with your zigbee, there’s a problem with your zigbee coordinator. If you walk through your neighborhood with a sniffer there are probably 20 zigbee networks every few blocks. Security systems, Phillips hue bridges, utility company smart meters, set top cable boxes, maybe some home automation, medical monitors, outdoor weather stations – – the list goes on.
Philips would never have had the success they have had with Hue if zigbee weren’t resilient, but more importantly it wouldn’t be deployed by security companies and cable TV companies and utility companies.
Yes, boosted Wi-Fi can interfere with a SmartThings zigbee network, and I’ve mentioned that before. What I haven’t mentioned each time is that it doesn’t interfere with any of the other zigbee networks in my home, and there are at least three. Or perhaps more accurately the others seem to handle temporary interference better.
Put a Bluetooth earpiece in your ear and your phone in your pocket playing music and walk around your house and neighborhood. If the earpiece doesn’t drop connection, most zigbee should be fine.
I don’t know why the ST zigbee network seems to be somewhat more fragile than is typical, I just know that at my house it is.
But like John said, don’t blame the neighbors. Or the protocol. 
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I don’t know why zigbee is more fragile and zwave is slower, but it is what it is, and the only thing we can do, is to blame @JohnR for his powerful repeaters that kills our mesh and slows down our zwave devices instead of looking for a better controller. (exaggeration intended to justify our inabilty to fix the unfixable, unless more drastic measures are taken)
Apologies @JohnR my comment was totally in jest and shouldn’t be taken any other way. If anything I am jealous that you’re able to put in such a strong mesh in the US. Signals over here in the UK for zigbee connections are feeble in comparison.
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It depends on the end device. It can be configured to demand an ACK from a receiving node. Most plugged in devices are like this. Without an ACK it will reconfigure it’s routing table with a different node.
Battery powered devices could go either way, it saves power to go back to sleep without waiting for an ACK. If the node it was using as a router is gone, the message is lost. However these sleepy devices still poll periodically, and if the node is gone during a poll it will hunt for a new one.