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@Heinz Thank you! I really appreciate that 😁

Hi @Zyrkonim, Thank you for the response! I think all the tradeoffs make sense. I suppose I was looking more for insight on specific decisions made for Shelly devices, and how they ended up falling on one side or the other of a decision boundary. For example, the Shelly 1 UL Smart Relay Switch only uses 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, has protocols 802.11 b/g/n, and seems to be Wi-Fi CERTIFIED. Supporting several Wi-Fi protocols and getting Wi-Fi certification require a non-negligible amount of time and money -- was there a clear market incentive to do so? Are there any plans on adding Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) to the list of supported protocols in a 2.4GHz-only capacity as well? @Heinz Haha yeah, the inquiry is for a project I'm working on at LBNL. I guess I'm not really looking for anything general to IoT or networking overall, since the tech is all out there and the tradeoff spaces are pretty clear. I'm more curious about when companies get down to the nitty gritty of having to make decisions for consumer products with actual money and market effects on the line, what comes out when the dust settles and what were the main deciding factors that went into the design and implementation.

I’m working on understanding design tradeoffs that appliance manufacturers make when selecting the Wi-Fi modules and functionalities for Wi-Fi-enabled household devices (e.g., Shelly relays). I would appreciate if you could answer some of the following questions, or connect me with someone who can. Thank you very much for your time and consideration! Regarding the radio hardware: What criteria is the most important for choosing between 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequency communications? Range? Throughput? Power consumption? Reliability? Robustness to interference? Chip costs/size? What criteria is the most important for selecting between different Wi-Fi chipsets? Cost? Size? Form factor? Reliability? Power consumption? Ease of programming? Availability? Regarding the Wi-Fi protocol: What criteria is most important for selecting a Wi-Fi standard (i.e., 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax) to implement? Throughput? Reliability? Robustness to interference? Pre-existing codebase? Power consumption? Router compatibility? The recent Wi-Fi 6 standard (i.e., 802.11ax) was designed with IoT applications in mind and is capable of handling significantly more connected devices without network congestion, compared to previous standards. Have y’all considered implementing Wi-Fi 6 on your devices? What are the main challenges, blockers, or non-starters to doing so? The Wi-Fi Alliance offers certification programs to endorse the network functionality of Wi-Fi enabled devices. Have y’all considered certifying your devices through these programs? What are the main challenges, blockers, or non-starters to doing so? Regarding local network reliability: When setting up the device, what do you recommend testing for to ensure a reliable connection? Internet speed? Throughput? RSSI strength? What are the minimum recommended requirements for good network connectivity? Is a device able to notify the homeowner when these requirements are not met? What happens when a device loses power or connectivity locally? Does it attempt to reconnect to the network? Is there a way to notify the homeowner if a device has been offline for an extended period of time? Network connectivity issues due to network congestion in device-rich environments may be exacerbated by repeated reconnection attempts. How do your devices handle reconnection attempts and avoid flooding the network and causing more collisions? Is there a back-off algorithm or maximum number of retries implemented? How often do devices accidentally disconnect from the network? Are they usually able to reconnect successfully or do they require human intervention? What are some of the more common issues that require human intervention to resolve? If a device loses power and reboots, is it able to reconnect automatically to the network again? Or do passwords and configurations reset to factory defaults? If they reset, is this for security reasons or for simplicity of code or for some other reason? Regarding household network reliability: What happens when an entire building or household loses power or internet connectivity? Are there fall-backs in place to continue operation of the device? Thank you for reading!