Known TP-Link Kasa Smart Plug Networking Issues That Affect Sense Integration

Technical Questions
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From @Dcdyer

My Observations:

  1. I manually ran individual single ‘once-only’ pings to check all my connections – multiple times. What I saw was a very high ping response time on single pings. Maybe the smart device was slow to wake-up or maybe my internal LAN was slow to map the route. I’m not certain.
  2. I choose to run a .BAT program using 25 pings to each device and take the average value. 25 pings should be statistically enough data to give a valid average. I took that single average number and recorded it in a file. So each data point in my file is the average of 25 pings. All recorded values are in Milliseconds.
  3. I performed this over a 3-day period. Note: My test is still running and capturing more data. The scan rate is about every 5 minutes.
  4. What I did noticed is that my KASA HS110 products are failing to respond. (Timeouts at 2500 ms).
    Failed to respond:
    HS110 (downstairs) 74% and
    HS110 (upstairs) 94% of the time.
    I had already suspected that the upstairs unit was not responding to SENSE requests and moved the unit to another location to get a better connection to the WiFi signal. This unit is OFF most of the time and sees very little usage. I was surprised to see the HS110 downstairs unit having the same problem. I’m not sure how to gather data on failed responses.
  5. My Smart phones are still dropping my WiFi connection. I suspected the problem was other smart devices creating ‘congestion’, but it might be the HS110 devices are beginning to fail.
  6. I probably took a more tedious approach to graphically displaying the data (EXCEL) than was necessary.
  7. All of my SENSE communications (to the mother ship and the smart device modules – KASA) occurs thru my Netgear Extender. That’s why I included it in my test. All my other internet devices are network hardwired (including my thermostats). I did not see the point in testing any hardwired connections, but I might reconsider that in future testing.
  8. I did download a free ping APP on my ANDROID phone and checked ping times against my .BAT program and got similar results. The phone APP doesn’t create a file, just a display.
  9. The Netgear 6100 extender has a static IP address. I assigned it. The other devices are dynamic.
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