Is it time to upgrade that smart home router?

On a recent Internet of Things Podcast, we took a voicemail from Keith about his smart home router. He’s been adding and removing hubs, switches, bulbs and security devices from his wireless networks over the years. Keith wants to know if he should completely disconnect all of his smart home devices from the network and re-add them to make the system faster. Keith is currently using an older mesh router, likely with Wi-Fi 5, so he’s also considering an upgrade to a Wi-Fi 6 system to improve his smart home.

This is interesting because Keith is probably like many of you: He has removed connected devices mainly by physically taking them off of the network. But he still sees the older devices in his smart home hub app. By that I mean older devices appearing as “offline” in the Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home or Samsung SmartThings mobile apps.

I admit that I occasionally do the same:

However, this really doesn’t affect your smart home router. The leftover “cruft” of devices are only hanging out in the smart phone apps. While a router will remember approved devices that have previously connected to it, unless you have hundreds of them, the router isn’t spending any resources managing them. So from that perspective, the devices no longer used aren’t impacting network or smart home performance.

In Keith’s case then, replacing the router isn’t something we’d say is necessary. It wouldn’t hurt to completely uninstall all connected devices from the smart home platform and then set them all up again. That would ensure that only the currently used devices would appear in the hub applications.

A quicker way to do this would be to remove the old devices in the hub apps. However, Stacey and I both do a full smart home reset every year or two although that’s partially because we test so many devices.

As far as the smart home router replacement, it’s never a bad thing to have a better network. Keep in mind however that Wi-F 6 and newer Wi-Fi 6E mesh systems won’t directly improve the performance of smart home devices. These standards are meant to boost speeds of larger data activities such as video streaming and general internet use on computers, tablets and phones. However, many of them support the new Matter standard, so you can prepare for that transition with a modern router.

Indirectly, newer routers can remove some network congestion with the addition of 6 GHz wireless bandwidth. That’s the “channel” for larger amounts of data.

So when your TV or computer moves to 6GHz Wi-Fi, it frees up the digital highway for your smart home devices using 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies. And fewer devices competing for the network could improve device response times.

Keep in mind that there’s little benefit to upgrading your router if your home broadband is slow. I have a 1 Gbps fiber connection at my house, for example. So the newest Wi-Fi 6 and 6E routers can spread those full speeds throughout my home. If I had a 50 Mbps broadband connection, however, a new router wouldn’t magically boost my internet speeds.

So in Keith’s case, I’d do two things. First, I’d either manually remove the offline smart home devices from the hub software or I’d do a full smart home reset. Second, if my home broadband speeds were faster than my old router could handle, I’d upgrade to a new mesh system with Wi-Fi 6 or 6E. Then I’d be getting full internet speeds throughout the house and the smart home devices wouldn’t be competing with other computers for network time.

We’ve tested quite a few of the newer mesh routers and have had good experiences with the Eero product line. I still use the older Eero Pro 6 as I haven’t upgraded to 6E. A less expensive option would be the Google Nest Wifi Pro product.

To hear Keith’s question in full, as well as our discussion on the topic, tune in to the Internet of Things Podcast below: