Will the Mesh (Argon, Boron, Xenon) choose Wifi or Cellular if both connected?

This is something I tweeted (twitter @rocksetta) and Particle suggested I post it on the community. Be warned, I may tweet your reply’s.

(I realize this is new tech so we will have to wait for the hardware to prove anything, I just want to know what the plans are before purchasing my class sets.)

@dcschelt another question about the new @particle #IoT devices. If I have 10 #Mesh devices but only one is #cellular and one is #wifi and they are all nicely spaced so they are all interconnected. Will they choose the wifi over the cellular data?

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Without confering with the people who actually know :wink:

I’d think when both paths are available at the same time, the default would be to choose the shortes route - whichever gateway is hit first will care for delivery.
Since the topology may change with moving/appearing/disappering nodes or congestions it’d be hard to predict which gateway may get the packet for delivery.
But I’m pretty sure Particle will provide you with the required tools to influence the behaviour of the mesh.
After all, the gateways are also part of the mesh, so I’d imagine a way for the gateways in the mesh to communicate and hence decide whether a cellular or WiFi channel is required or not.

However, this is a good one for the FAQs - I’ll add it to the list.

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Just found this sort of connected topic

You’re spot on - some of these types of questions will be answered as we mature both the hardware and software. Handling multiple gateways is definitely one of the use cases we will support when we ship but one of the features yet-to-be finalized. But I can share with our early thoughts. We’d like to provide flexibility on how the cloud connection is used - especially for something like cellular, which incurs a developer cost. As an MVP, we’ll have a manual way set a single active gateway. Of course, we’d like multiple gateways to have the same self-healing, automatic behavior as the overall mesh. Today our Wi-Fi devices have modes like automatic or semi-automatic, and think we can extend something like that for gateways - including priority. Great question!

Feel free to reshare on Twitter - this is a public forum, we just find this format easier to have a dialog!

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Hi @jberi and @ScruffR, as we are getting closer to ship date, can you please let us know if there’s been any decision made regarding Argon+Boron in the same mesh?

What happens if a mesh has two gateways - Argon and Boron? Will it always prioritize WiFi connection over LTE? Is there any way to configure or enforce that?

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