May 22, 2025: Wireless smart home (Internet of Things, IOT) devices are proliferating and getting smarter and more helpful every day.  As a bleeding edge technology fan, I love them because they let me see what’s happening in my house even when I am not around, help me easily manage things, and generally just make my life easier.  But these devices aren’t just sitting around like loners, keeping their heads down and quietly doing their thing—the busybodies that they are, they are constantly chatting away, connecting with each other and with me, trying their best to keep my home running smoothly.

There are many wireless technologies that IOT devices use to talk: WiFi (both 2.4GHz and 5GHz), Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, RFID, Infrared, and more. But WiFi 2.4GHz presently seems to rule the world. It is cheap, works with practically every router on the market, and sends signals through walls pretty well. But the hidden “gotcha”—most routers, like the consumer-grade Netgear Nighthawk I was using, top out at around 30 to 50 devices. That number sounds ginormous, after all who could possibly have that many smart devices in their home?  Yet I recently found out just how quickly that limit sneaks up on you.

In the past month, I swapped out about 30 regular light switches in my home for Amazon Basics Smart Switches (https://amzn.to/4kAl6lm) so I can control them anywhere, program them to turn off at certain times or after being on for, say 30 minutes (think bathroom lights constantly left on).  On top of that, I replaced my 8 standard GFCI outlets with Leviton Smart GFCIs (https://amzn.to/4kAl6lm).  The smart GFCIs are awesome—they send me a notification on my phone if one trips, pinpointing exactly which outlet went down.  No more wandering around trying to guess if the circuit breaker or GFCI outlet is the culprit, and where the GFCI associated with an outlet might be.  I also got 6 Govee Circular Ceiling Lights (https://amzn.to/4kAl6lm) and 3 Govee Square Ceiling Lights (https://amzn.to/4kAl6lm).  These lights are fantastic–2,400 lumens of brightness and adjusting their color temperature is ridiculously easy.

Before I knew it, I was right up against that dreaded 50-device ceiling. And that’s without even counting my 4 smart TVs, 4 Amazon Echoes, 3 security cameras, a smart garage door opener, and other random devices scattered all over my house. Sure enough, when I started setting up the new switches, things got messy—devices refused to connect, even though I had a strong WiFi signal.  And some of my devices that I had already set up began exhibiting sporadic connection issues.  My eagerness to adopt new technologies had broken my internet.

Up until now, my Nighthawk router had done a good job.  But clearly, it was overwhelmed.  After doing some research I went for a Ubiquiti system.  Not cheap—the final total came out to a rather spooky $666.88—but worth every penny.  This setup offers incredible flexibility, handling hundreds of devices without batting an eyelash.

This is spendier than your average setup, but it works great!  Setup was a breeze.  The access points connect to the gateway through ethernet cables and since they are powered over the same cables (POE) that was the only connection that needed to be made.  Once connected the gateway instantly recognized them.  The UniFi app made it easy to set up a dedicated WiFi 2.4ghz network for my IOT devices and a separate fast WiFi network for my family to use.  It handles tons of connections easily, offers intuitive setup for multiple WiFi networks, and even lets me monitor things remotely.  Plus, it integrates smoothly with security cameras (though those cameras can definitely push the budget), and the whole setup is super reliable—way better than what you typically get at consumer-level prices. Given that my wife works full-time from home, rock-solid WiFi isn’t just nice—it’s essential.  So for us, it’s totally justified.

Finally, a quick heads-up: Amazon sends me a small referral fee if you buy through my links.  But if you’d prefer Amazon keep that money, just use the product names provided here and search directly on their site.

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