What still works when the broadband goes down

What keeps working

Wall switches and touch panels. These are physical controls wired to the circuit. Press one and the light comes on, with the router unplugged and the phone in another room. A touch panel counts here too. It sits exactly where your old switch sat and it works the same way.

Local automations. If the rules live on a hub in your house, they carry on. Curtains still open at seven. The tank still fills when the water arrives. Sensor lights still come on when somebody walks past.

Anything on the same home network. Your phone can still control the house over Wi-Fi even when the Wi-Fi has no route to the internet, as long as the system was built to work that way.

What stops

Control from outside the house. You cannot check the porch light from the office.

Notifications. Your phone will not tell you the tank is full or somebody rang the doorbell.

Voice assistants, usually. Alexa and Google both send what you say to a server before anything happens, so a broadband outage takes voice with it. The switch on the wall still works.

Anything cloud-only. Some products do all their thinking on a company server, including things that happen entirely inside your house. Those stop completely.

Power cuts and broadband drops are different problems

People tend to bundle these together. In Jaipur they are both normal, and they need different answers.

A broadband drop leaves the house powered. Everything wired keeps working, the hub keeps running its rules, and only the outside world is missing.

A power cut is a different situation, because nothing is powered until the inverter picks up. What matters then is which circuits are on your inverter. If the lights you care about are backed up, the smart modules on those circuits come back with them. If the hub is not backed up, your automations stop until mains returns.

This is worth thinking about before the install, not after, because it costs nothing to put the hub on a backed-up circuit and a lot of annoyance to move it later.

The one question to ask

Ask any installer this, in these words: if my internet is disconnected for a week, what in this house stops working?

A good answer names specific things and is short. Remote access, notifications, voice. A bad answer is vague, or reassuring without detail, or explains why the internet never really goes down.

Ask a second question if you want to be thorough: if the company that made this product shuts down, what happens? Standards-based hardware such as Matter and Zigbee keeps working with someone else's hub. A closed system may not.

Where we still fit cloud products

We are not absolutist about this, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Some categories do not have a good local option yet at a sensible price. Certain video door phones and cameras are much better when they can use a company's service, and some voice features only exist in the cloud.

Where we specify something like that, we name it as cloud-dependent on your design sheet before you buy it, along with what happens if that service disappears. What we will not do is build a house where a cloud account is the only way to turn on a light. The rules we design against

What this looks like in practice

Take a normal evening in a house we have done. The broadband is out. You come home and press the panel by the door, and the lights come on. The seven o'clock curtain schedule runs, because the hub in the meter cupboard does not care about the internet.

The tank fills at eleven that night when supply reaches your street, because the tank controller is a separate device doing a local job.

What you do not get is the notification telling you it filled, and you cannot ask Alexa to turn anything off. You use the switch, which is what you would have done anyway before any of this was installed.