I have a NETGEAR Nighthawk AC1750 router. I was thinking of getting the smarthing connect home. I have over 26 devices using the WiFi. My question is could I use the smarthings connect home as a secondary router to relieve some of the traffic on my main WiFi by connecting the slower devices to the connect home and keeping everything else on my main Netgear Night hawk (different WiFI Channels)? If ,so could I do this by simply connecting the Samsung connect directly to my Nighthawk router the same as if it were a regular hub or would I need a switch or something? I am aware that at the least the system would treat it as two different WiFi networks and that would affect streaming to devices on different networks.
Another question can I use presence detection by what devices (like someone’s phone) connects to the samsung connect home like some brands of routers can?
Third Question will having two Samsung connect home devices as a mesh network increase the reliability of my zwave and zigbee networks by having two or more main access points. I have over 50 zwave devices but since my Samsung hub is on one side of my house sometimes a device goes down and blacks out a whole room or more.
I take your questions in reverse order. Your samsung connect home will extend the range of your zigbee and z-wave networks since it acts as a repeater. Reliability is dependant on a lot more factors than just the distance to an AP so you can’t say it will increase reliability but it should.
You can use presence detection like that. I don’t know of any router that does that but I’d be interested to hear what brand router you’ve found that does. You can do this with any wifi network through many different methods. The most popular is probably Tasker + SharpTools. Search for either of those will find a bunch of articles.
Last, your wifi question. Yes, if you set up your Connect home with a different SSID than your NightHawk, then you would eliminate traffic from one to the other. If you were to connect one of your connect home to your NH’s rj45 ports, it would treat the NH as it’s “modem” and the NH would treat the connect home as a device. You would then have to have the DHCP servers running on both routers. Essentially what you’re doing is running two WiFi networks. Now, the drawback to this is that the two networks won’t be able to talk to each other unless you open up the CH router with port forwarding. But anything that relies on autodiscovery won’t find it. Cause it’s on a different network. Now, you say you have 24 wifi devices connected. I have a netgear 6250 AC router and I have 34 devices actively connected at the moment. And when downloading from my wifi I still do not get a bottleneck except from the source. You have to remember that IOT devices may send a lot of signals but they aren’t very big. Also, all of the traffic from my iot devices is restricted to my 2.4ghz channels and my main devices (PCs and phones) connect on 5ghz. That way I’m able to maximize the speed of my 5 ghz signals. Most IOT devices don’t even support AC so they best they can do is N wireless.
So, before sinking all that money into a Connect Home, you might want ot figure out if you really need it.