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I am currently studying Internet of Things and found that there are bunch of devices are using zigbee and Wifi. Take Xiaomi smart wifi plug for example, it does not require an extra gateway(router) to connect to WAN. I assume it connects to my LAN via gateway first and the gateway takes it to the WAN. On contrarily, Xiaomi smart Zig-Bee plug requires Xiaomi-gateway to be connected to WAN. My question is why it can not connect to my LAN gateway as the Xiaomi smart wifi plug does. Aren't they all have soc chip on board like a normal pc does? My reference is from here

Second, many smart wifi plugs support cell phone that connects to different network other than the one wifi plugs to control the wifi plugs. For example, control your home devices when you're outside. I can not get how this works. I thought devices can only talk to devices that share the same network(LAN).

Thanks!

ctheadn8954
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  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not a programming question, it's a technical question about networking technologies. – tomlogic Aug 15 '18 at 22:35
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    @tomlogic hi, thank u. I am wondering where can I post these kinds of "conceptual questions"?? I thought stack overflow is the right place for any IT questions, no matter codes are included in discussions or not. – ctheadn8954 Aug 16 '18 at 15:24

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Most people have a Wi-Fi gateway to the Internet in their house already (i.e., their router/access point). A device using Wi-Fi can connect to that existing gateway. For Zigbee, you need a router that supports Zigbee and connects to the Internet in some way.

As for controlling devices from your phone. If both the smart plug and your phone can connect to the Internet, you can have a publicly accessible server on the Internet that relays messages from the phone to the smart plug.

tomlogic
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  • Got it. Glad you mention the physical deviation between these gateways. Reason that wifi devices doesn't require an extra gateway is because our home router is compatible with them already. – ctheadn8954 Aug 16 '18 at 15:26