I bought a dozen wifi/matter bulbs just before Christmas and just back from an internet 24hr outage, during that outage all the matter bulbs went offline
How were these integrated with Hubitat? Directly, put first paired to something else?
What type of home network equipment are you using? Some of the “WiFi Mesh” systems shutdown all network traffic when the internet goes down. Seems crazy to me. Hopefully that is not what happened to your system. During the Internet outage, were any parts of your system restarted (e.g. a power blip OR manual restart of anything?) The Hubitat hub does rely on the Internet to set its date/time correctly. If the hub was rebooted during the outage, then time-based automations might not work reliably. Just a hypothesis.
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All were installed by an echo
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I restarted my Hubitats hoping the may come back, but they didn't
Just to make sure we understand…
You bought “Matter over WiFi” bulbs, correct? Not “Matter over Thread”?
You used the Amazon Echo to Commision these Matter over WiFi bulbs. Then shared these bulbs with Hubitat (I.e. used the Alexa app on your phone to generate Matter pairing codes that you then used on Hubitat to add these Matter over WiFi bulbs), correct?
During the Internet outage, did you try controlling these bulbs via the Amazon Echo? Via Hubitat web admin interface? Or other means?
Once a Matter over WiFi device is added to Hubitat’s Matter Controller, the communications between Hubitat and the bulb is direct. The Amazon Echo does not play any “man in the middle” role whatsoever. Thus communications should still work even if you unplug your Amazon Echo devices. (Note: If these were Matter over Thread devices, then the Amazon Echo’s Thread Radio is acting as a Thread Border Router (TBR) to bridge the Thread and WiFi/Ethernet networks. Thus, the TBR (Amazon Echo) must stay powered on for that communication to continue to work.
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Yes Matter over wifi and commissioned by an echo, and they were offline in the echo mobile app everything else was able to be controlled via the echo using virtual devices where necessary, except my remaining wifi devices which I could turn off and on manually with the mains switches but not the matter bulbs they stayed off until my internet was restored
Matter over Wi-Fi is not inherently unreliable. It’s just more sensitive to the exact things consumer Wi-Fi struggles with when the device count grows: multicast handling, airtime congestion, and roaming behavior. That’s why it can look effortless in small demos, but gets unpredictable in real homes with lots of devices.
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I assume you mean the Alexa app? First, not sure why anyone would use that abomination for device control. Second, that entire app is cloud based, so I am pretty sure even if your devices are locally connected via Matter, the app would need access to your Echo device via the internet to tell it to turn control the devices. I do not think the app is capable of local communications to the Echo.
Had you use Hubitat to control the devices via a local dashboard, it should have worked.
Mine are very reliable..
That's why I don't use consumer grade network gear.. I use UNIFI and have an access point in almost every room..
Wow. Is your house concrete block?
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Orbi 970 with wired backhaul.
You are probably the 1% here.
Most consumers are going to have the crappy combo wifi/modem thing that their ISP provides, or maybe a $50-$100 TP Link/Netgear Nighthawk, if you can trust the top number of sold items on Amazon.
I think many of these early Matter devices need firmware updates to improve reliability that they will never get. I also think most users will get frustrated and ignore Matter if they have a bad initial experience due to their crappy Wifi router. Or worse yet if they have a crappy Matter experience it will turn them off from home automation in general.
That said, in general my Matter stuff works OK. I did have to join them again at one point, they were joined to Alexa, and shared to Hubitat. I put the lights away for a while, and after that they would no longer work in either Alexa or Hubitat no matter what I would do. Nothing in my network (equipment or topology) changed, so I suspect that the bulbs themselves forgot my Wifi credentials or something similar.
I paired these again using Hubitat app, which worked well, and they have been fine since.
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This.
So far, I'm in that same camp for Matter though. Time will tell and maybe I change my view'; but when you need IPV6 and soo many resources (RAM, processing flash etc) just to turn on a light bulb... there's a problem. I know, just my opinion... and the OPs. I also remain unimpressed.
And now I find my Virgin Media router/modem is not suitable for multicast
