It would be nice for the Hubitat hub to also be able to connect to a Wi-Fi access point wirelessly in addition to Ethernet. But that could cause complications with RF interference.
Yeah but wouldn't that drive up the cost even further and add complexity?
There are lots of options out there for this already including wifi extenders, Wifi to ethernet adapters/bridges, mesh wifi systems and depending upon your use-case powerline adapters or Ethernet to Coax MoCA adapters..
3 Likes
This has been requested several times in the past, with the first I remember being shortly after the introduction of the hub in 2018:
My takeaway is that it is unlikely to happen. However, if you do not have an existing wired connection to where you want to place your hub, there are at least two solutions mentioned in that thread: Ethernet over powerline adapters or various wifi-to-wired bridges, several of which you can find mentioned in that thread. Even if they do add it in the future, the C-7 was just released and you'd likely be waiting a while anyway. 
(Also, I hope you don't mind that I moved your post to the "Feature Requests" category where I think it is better suited.)
5 Likes
Yep, the lack of a Wi-Fi feature is not a big deal but maybe it could be optional for extra $ for those who want to optimize the hub location.
Creating two different versions of the hub with optional hardware components seems like more than a minimal change to their current manufacturing process.
I’m not sure they could avoid passing on the additional cost required to only the people that want it as an option.
There is a zillion way a WiFi connection can go wrong. Even with a simple wire, routers drop hubs occasionally, and users have to unplug/plug/power cycles one or both devices. I'm going to second ekestel's suggestion of using powerline adapters. I got some in the house, and as long as they are plugged into the outlet itself (no surge protectors, etc.), and all outlets connect to the same circuit breaker box, the connection is very stable. And they're cheap.
5 Likes
MoCA stuff is cool too.. and uses your existing coax lines if available. Adapters can be a tad pricey though.
SmartThings Hub-V3 has both wired and wireless at roughly half the cost of the HE-C7. These days, onboard WiFi is dirt cheap and can be added for peanuts (about $1-$2 tops)
Yeah, sure, there are other options, WiFi extenders, Powerline Ethernet, MoCA. but all those cost a bunch more than the few peanuts it would cost to add onboard WiFi to the hub itself.
Excluding all the development costs and manufacturing logistics a small company like HE would have to bear in order to get something like that out of course. For them the cost/benefit seems like it's not worth it at the present time but that's speculation on my part.
Given the potential unreliability of WiFi means I'm not currently interested - I now have some clients I have to support as well as FAF (family acceptance factor). Maybe they could offer an addon "dongle" or similar and bundle it with the hub as a "pro" kit. POE would be nice too but I can work around that as well.
2 Likes
Perhaps an additional USB port to support a dongle, opening up other possibilities...
As it turns out, adding a USB port to support a WiFi Dongle would be more costly and have higher development costs than adding a dedicated on-board ESP8266 WiFi chip. Seriously, in this day and age of IoT, adding on-board WiFi to almost anything is dirt cheap. There is very little economic reason against it.
With that said, there may very well be Business reasons to not do it, but the cost/complexity factors are almost all gone with technology that is available today.
While I don't know about the C-5 and C-7 hardware, the original (C-3/C-4) hub appears to be based on an X96 Mini, which came with an onboard WiFi chip--so the question wasn't really the cost of adding hardware but rather if the effort of making it work and the cost to them of supporting the option was worth it. For the reasons mentioned by staff (Bruce) in the post I linked to above and re-itereated again by other staff in this thread, I don't think their opinion on that is likely to change. But the good news is that there are lots of options you can already do on your own.
3 Likes
