When you encounter problems with smart home devices, you probably think about the router’s range, Wi-Fi interference, or hardware limits. It can be surprising to learn that your router’s security settings might be acting as the bottleneck. Modern routers have been supporting WPA3 for many years now. Since WPA2 was proven vulnerable to dictionary and brute-force attacks and used a shared password for all devices, it was more secure to use WPA3 to connect to all your devices. While routers and most other devices made the jump to WPA3 with modern Wi-Fi chips, the bulk of smart home devices remain stuck on WPA2. This forces you to use the WPA2/WPA3 Mixed Mode on your router, which often creates handshake failures and connection issues on your older smart home devices. The best fix is to ensure maximum security using WPA3 for your newer devices, while isolating your IoT devices to a separate, WPA2-only network.