This question was posted on www.element-14.com:

My Wifi signal seems to be intermittent in certain areas of my house, so I am seeking an alternative.

But first let me discuss my requirements:

1. Connecting all devices in my home on 3 different floors; mostly being PCs, Phones, Ethernet TV, and of course the X-Box 360.

2. Connect all PCs in my garage machines shop. (A high noise environment)

3. And connectivity in the surrounding yard, over an acre, would be nice too.

I like Zigbee due to its mesh network topology. I assume it would work well for high noise areas, which is the most critical for me. Anyone work with Zigbee for factories or other high interference locations?

For the record, I am connecting all devices ultimately to a 20mbps Internet connection from RCN.

Pinter Electronics Consultants’ answered:

Chris Pinter answers, “Our lab has done a fair amount of research in the area of the interoperability between Zigbee, Wi-Fi bluetooth and other 2.4 GHz radio systems that operate in the 2.4 Ghz ISM band.   Our research has shown that the zigbee protocol is rather weak when it come to interoperability.  The zigbee transmission is very susceptible to any noise in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, even microwave ovens.

For a home entertainment system you definitely want to go with a Wi-Fi system.  There are many types of Wi-Fi to consider so make sure to get one uses maximum bandwidth.  There are many 802.11g products out there that use multiply channels to transmit this allows for larger bandwidth so was to limit the effects of noise.”

If you want to read the full discussion click here.