With a modern Wi-Fi-based smart home, every single smart bulb, robotic vacuum, Wi-Fi plug, smart camera, and thermostat you buy dramatically spams your primary home network. Suddenly, your router’s client table is flooded with dozens of chatty, low-bandwidth IoT devices. If you mix all of these IoT devices with high-throughput devices like your gaming PC or streaming 4K files from your NAS, this can create both network congestion and a major security blind spot. Instead of throwing away an old dual-band Wi-Fi router that you got sitting in a drawer, you can configure it as a dedicated isolated access point running on a separate subnet, strictly for IoT gear.