Because buying the solution is boring!
When people talk about upgrading their home network, they usually assume downtime is unavoidable. Devices disconnect, credentials change, and someone in the house inevitably gets frustrated. My goal was different: I wanted a seamless network migration where I could replace Google WiFi with ASUS hardware without touching a single device.
This article documents what I actually did not what a textbook migration looks like.
I didn’t create an IoT only Wi-Fi network because it was trendy. I did it because it’s best practice for a reason and my home network was proving that the hard way. Random disconnects, smart devices refusing to reconnect, and small configuration changes turning into full outages made it obvious that everything sharing one network was a bad idea.
This post explains why separating smart devices onto an IoT only Wi-Fi network is one of the most practical and stability-focused decisions I’ve made, and why I won’t be merging them back.
I’ve been running Google WiFi pods since 2019, but replacing Google WiFi recently became unavoidable after years of reliability started to slip. For a long time, the system was exactly what I wanted: simple, stable, and invisible. I set it up once and didn’t think about it again.
That changed over the past few months.