Belkin WeMo and Ubiquiti mFi Home Automation Platforms Review

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Home automation needs to be 'green'. Tracking the power consumption of battery-operated devices is challenging. However, we are only looking at AC-powered devices today. In order to do some evaluation. we connected the WeMo Insight Switch and mPower (3-port) to the two outlets of a mFi In-Wall Outlet. The instantaneous power consumption was tracked every second over a 5-minute interval for different situations and the results are tabulated below.

The mPower consumes insignificant power to remain connected to the Wi-Fi network, while the Belkin Insight consumes an average of 1.44 W for this purpose. Turning on the relays ends up consuming power as shown above. Based on the above observations, Belkin can optimize the firmware and/or platform choice to give consumers a more power efficient product. The mPower consumes power within reasonable limits with the relays turned on. However, the AR9331 is by no means a low-power Wi-Fi SoC. It will be interesting to see the Wi-Fi SoCs used by Ubiquiti Networks in future iterations in this product space.

Interoperability is another aspect of home automation systems. While the WeMo is officially a closed platform, the reverse engineered aspects have made it possible for even the mFi controllers to control WeMo devices.

Earlier this month, we arrived at a set of points to ponder when dealing with any home automation system / device. Using those, we have come up with a summary table that provides essential information about the Belkin WeMo and the Ubiqiuiti Networks mFi at a glance.

Belkin has an awesome ecosystem of products with the WeMo - the only thing it needs to do to make the ecosystem more reliable and user-friendly is to allow consumers the option of disassociating completely from the cloud service. They need to release the WeMo cloud server program officially and allow it to run on a machine in the local network. While there are third-party unofficial solutions such as Mike's WemoManager and WemoServer, they are only trying to fix Belkin's shortcomings.  We do agree that machine learning on a large scale from multiple users (particularly for the WemoWater that is yet to be released) is possible when everything goes through Belkin's cloud servers. However, the current state of the cloud service and the apps mean that users might be better off just having a local system-based solution to go with the WeMo hardware.

Coming back to the Ubiquiti Networks mFi lineup, the non-Wi-Fi-based mPort sensors may pose a challenge to install for the general audience. The building automation / enterprise focus of the mFi lineup is an acceptable excuse, though - consumers involved in those types of setups are usually professionals and understand the technology. That said, Ubiquiti Networks will be the first to admit that their product is not designed and/or marketed for the average consumer. This is a pity, because, under the rough exterior (lack of official apps, requirement of an on-premises home automation server for complex scenes and rules, lack of marketing etc.), we have a very flexible and open-source friendly home automation platform.

There are probably many home automation devices that are more open / open-source friendly and/or user-friendly compared to the Ubiquiti Networks mFi platform. However, we recommend mFi due to the following aspects:

• Pricing: The mFi modules may be cheap in terms of the retail prices, but the build-quality and reliability are enterprise-grade.
• Right balance of out-of-the-box readiness to deploy and end-user flexibility
• Security and privacy aspects handled well by avoiding the cloud
• Support and user forums: Developers have a major presence and respond to user feedback and bug reports promptly.

Belkin's WeMo is popular amongst consumers, but, even after 2 years in the market, they still have a lot to do in terms of delivering a consistent user-experience. On the other hand, the support software ecosystem for the Ubiquiti Networks mFi lineup needs to cater better to the non-tech-savvy consumers - However, that doesn't prevent us from recommending the Ubiquiti Networks mFi to the AnandTech audience.