Is it unrealistic to try to run my Apple Home setup via cellular hotspot on my iPhone? And the same question goes for my Google Hone setup?
My home s 1500 square feet if that helps answer the question.
“Unrealistic” is tough to answer.. what’s the context here? What are you hoping to accomplish and what are the limitations?
One of the ideas behind IoT devices is generally that they’re always connected and addressable when needed. When you introduce an ephemeral network with the hotspot you lose that functionality. So is that realistic given your requirements?
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As @knewman says, unrealistic is tough to answer, but using the a ’phone as the Wi-Fi is extremely limiting and negates 90% of the reasons to use IoT smart home devices in the first place…
Why, would be my first question.
Secondly, a lot of smart home stuff requires bridges. Lights, like Hue, require a dedicated Bridge with an Ethernet port that connects to your router/switch. Things like security sensors, thermometers, hygrometers and thermostats often use Zigbee or DECT to transfer the data in the background, so you need a bridge for those as well, which often connect via Ethernet to the local network. (Zigbee & DECT use a fraction of the electricity of Wi-Fi and devices that would need new batteries or recharging every few weeks to a couple of months on Wi-Fi can run for a year or more on Zigbee or DECT with the same size battery.
In addition, for Apple Home, you need a HomePod 2nd generation/HomePod mini or a current generation AppleTV 4K with Ethernet port to act as a Matter controller for the network (I’m not sure what Google and Amazon use as an equivalent controller) - most good IoT devices use the open Matter protocol to talk to them directly from Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa etc., as well as using their own proprietary apps.
If you have a newish iPhone Pro, you can connect it via a USB-C to Ethernet adapter to your router or switch, to act as a hotspot, but you will probably need to do some playing around with the routing table, because the iPhone has to be on the same network as the IoT devices that are cabled or coming in over one of the cabled bridges, so simply plugging it into the WAN port of the router wouldn’t work.
You also have the problem of the whole house stopping working, if you go out of range. If you have door or window sensors, a camera, a water sensor in the basement or under the kitchen sink, smoke alarms etc. None of them can raise an alarm until the iPhone/Android phone is back in range, the hotspot activated and the devices have noticed that they are back online and can start spamming out all of the buffered messages - dozen of messages then suddenly start arriving, telling you that the leak in the kitchen started 6 hours ago… At least you will be warned that the kitchen is under water, before you get in the front door, if you have restricted yourself to purely Wi-Fi IoT devices.
If you restrict yourself to the relatively small selection of IoT devices that run over Wi-Fi and not Zigbee, DECT or other protocols and you don’t have any sensors or automations (turning the lights on and closing the blinds when it gets dark, to deter thieves, for example), it might work in a limited form, but it will still be a pain to do and the reliability will be questionable - if the devices are buffering messages for hours at a time, until they come back online, it might be possible that they run out of memory or they regularly crash and need restarting, because the network is offline for a large portion of every day.
If, on the other hand, you mean you are in an area that doesn’t have DSL, cable, fibre or other wired broadband connections available, you can get dedicated LTE or 5G routers that will provide all the devices with the permanent connection they need and allow you to get notifications from alarms etc. when you are away from home, or you can trigger actions or automations whilst you are not there. Here, in Germany, a 100GB a month 5G contract costs about 25€ a month, a flat rate around 50€ a month (my daughter used an O2 LTE contract a few years ago, when she moved into her new flat and the broadband provider wasn’t going to lay the cable for another 3 months, she was chewing through around 500GB a month on the contract, watching YouTube & Netflix, but O2 never complained).
Alternatively, there are things like Musky Husky’s Starlink, if getting a 5G router and contract is prohibitively expensive in your area.
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Thank you both for your answers.
I do have fibre in my town and that’s what I connect with.
The problem I was having was that my HomePod minis kept dropping their network connections. I thought it was the fault of the ISP and their equipment and setup. So was looking at alternative connections. Like using a cellular device or signing up for a nationwide fibre service like VMedia (I guess you would describe services like that as an MVNO for the internet rather than cell phones).
Anyway, after a long back and forth with Gemini, I finally figured out that the way I was configuring and connecting my devices with my ISP’s router and my AirCove router (a router sold by ExpressVPN; my VPN of choice, obviously) was incorrect. After making some configuration adjustments and connecting my Ethernet cables correctly between the two routers, all is now good.
I love using AI to help troubleshoot so many problems I stumble across!
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