The “smart home” market segment is, I’ve deduced after many years of observing it and, in a notable number of “guinea pig” cases, personally participating in it (with no shortage of scars to show for my experiments and experiences), tough for suppliers to enter and particularly remain active for any reasonable amount of time. I generally “bin” such companies into one of three “buckets”, ordered as follows in increasing “body counts”:
- Those that end up succeeding long-term as standalone entities (case study: Wyze)
- Those who end up getting acquired by larger entities (case studies: Blink, Eero, and Ring, all by Amazon, and Nest, by Google)
- And the much larger list of those who end up fading away (one recent example: Neato Robotics’ robovacs), a demise often predated by an interim transition of formerly-free associated services to paid (one-time or, more commonly, subscription-based) successors as a last-gasp revenue-boosting move, and a strategy that typically fails due to customers instead bailing and switching to competitors.
There’s one other category that also bears mentioning, which I’ll be highlighting today. It involves companies that remain relevant long-term by periodically culling portions-to-entireties of product lines within the overall corporate portfolio when they become fiscally unpalatable to maintain. A mid-2020 writeup from yours truly, as an example, showcased a case study of each; Netgear stopped updating dozens of router models’ firmware, leaving them vulnerable to future compromise in favor of instead compelling customers to replace the devices with newer models (four-plus years later, I highlighted a conceptually similar example from Western Digital), and Best Buy dumped its Connect smart home device line in its entirety.
A Belkin debacle
Today’s “wall of shame” entry is Belkin. Founded more than 40 years ago, the company today remains a leading consumer electronics brand; just in the past month or so, I’ve bought some multi-port USB chargers, a couple of MagSafe Charging Docks, several RockStar USB-C and Lightning charging-plus-headphone adapters, and a couple of USB-C cables from them. Their Wemo smart plugs, on the other hand…for a long time, truth be told, I was a “frequent flyer” user and fan of ‘em. See, for example, these teardowns and hands-on evaluation articles:
- WeMo Switch is highly integrated (November 2015)
- Home automation control on the go (March 2016)
- A Wi-Fi smart plug for home automation (August 2018)
A few years ago, however, my Wemo love affair started to fade. Researchers had uncovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in older units, widely reported in May 2023, that allowed for remote control and broader hacking. But Belkin decided to not bother fixing the flaw, because affected devices were “at the end of their life and, as a result, the vulnerability will not be addressed” (whether it could have even been fixed with just a firmware update, with Belkin’s decline to do so therefore just a fundamental business decision, or reflected a fundamental hardware flaw necessitating a much more costly replacement of and/or refunds for affected devices, was never made clear to the best of my knowledge).
Two-plus years later, and earlier this summer, Belkin effectively pulled the plug on the near- entirety of the Wemo product line by announcing the pending sever of devices’ tethers not only to the Wemo mobile app and associated Belkin server-side account and devices’ management facilities, in a very Insteon-reminiscent move, but also in the process the “cloud” link to Amazon’s Alexa partner services. Ironically, the only remaining viable members of the Wemo product line after January 31, 2026 will be a few newer products that are alternatively controllable via the Thread protocol. As I aptly noted within my 2024 CES coverage:
Consider that the fundamental premise of Matter and Thread was to unite the now-fragmented smart home device ecosystem exemplified by, for example, the various Belkin Wemo devices currently residing in my abode. If you’re an up-and-coming startup in the space, you love industry standards, because they lower your market-entry barriers versus larger, more established competitors. Conversely, if you’re one of those larger, more established suppliers, you love barriers to entry for your competitors. Therefore the lukewarm-at-best (and more frequently, nonexistent or flat-out broken) embrace of Matter and Thread by legacy smart home technology and product suppliers.
Enter TP-Link
Clearly, it was time for me to look for a successor smart plug product line supplier and device series. Amazon was the first name that came to mind, but although its branded Smart Plug is highly rated, it’s only controllable via Alexa:
I was looking for an ecosystem that, like Wemo, could be broadly managed, not only by the hardware supplier’s own app and cloud services but also by other smart home standards such as the aforementioned Amazon (Alexa), along with Apple (HomeKit and Siri), Google (Home and Assistant, now transitioning to Gemini), Samsung (SmartThings), and ideally even open-source and otherwise vendor-agnostic services such as IFTTT and Matter-and-Thread.
I also had a specific hardware requirement that still needed to be addressed. The fundamental reason why we’d brought smart plugs into the home in the first place was so that we could remotely turn off the coffee maker in the kitchen if we later realized that we’d forgotten to do so prior to leaving the home; my wife’s bathroom-located curling iron later provided another remote-power-off opportunity. Clearly, standard smart plugs designed for low-wattage lamps and such wouldn’t suffice; we needed high-current-capable switching devices. And this requirement led to the first of several initially confusing misdirections with my ultimately selected supplier (motivated by rave reviews at The Wirecutter and elsewhere), TP-Link.
I admittedly hadn’t remembered until I did research prior to writing this piece that I’d actually already dissected an early TP-Link smart plug, the HS100, back in early 2017. That I’d stuck with Belkin’s Wemo product line for years afterward, admittedly coupled with my increasingly geriatric brain cells, likely explains the memory misfire. That very same device, along with its energy-monitoring HS110 sibling, had launched the company’s Kasa smart home device brand two years earlier, although looking back at the photos I took at the time I did my teardown, I can’t find a “Kasa” moniker anywhere on the device or its packaging, so…
My initial research indicated that the TP-Link Kasa HS103 follow-on, introduced a few years later and still available for purchase, would, along with the related HS105 be a good tryout candidate:
The two devices supposedly differed in their (resistive load) current-carrying capacity: 10 A max for the HS103 and 15 A for the HS105. I went looking for the latter, specifically for use with the aforementioned coffee maker and curling iron. But all I could find for sale was the former. It turns out that TP-Link subsequently redesigned and correspondingly up-spec’d the HS103 to also be 15A-capable, effectively obsoleting the HS105 in the process.
Smooth sailing, at least at first
And I’m happy to say that the HS103 ended up being both a breeze to set up and (so far, at least) 100% reliable in operation. Like the HS100 predecessor, along with other conceptually similar devices I’ve used in the past, you first connect to an ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection broadcast by the smart plug, which you use to send it your wireless LAN credentials via the mobile app. Then, once the smart plug reboots and your mobile device also reconnects to that same wireless LAN, they can see and communicate with each other via the Kasa app:
And then, after one-time initially installing Kasa’s Alexa skill and setting up my first smart plug in it, subsequent devices added via the Kasa app were then automatically added in Alexa, too:
Inevitable glitches
The latest published version of the Wirecutter’s coverage had actually recommended a newer, slightly smaller (but still 15A-capable) TP-Link smart plug, the EP10, so I decided to try it next:
Unfortunately, although the setup process was the same, the end result wasn’t:
This same unsuccessful outcome occurred with multiple devices from the first two EP10 four-pack sets I tried, which, like their HS103 forebears, I’d sourced from Amazon. Remembering from past experiences that glitches like this sometimes happen when a smartphone—which has two possible network connections, Wi-Fi and cellular—is used for setup purposes, I first disabled cellular data services on my Google Pixel 7, then tried a Wi-Fi-only iPad tablet instead. No dice.
I wondered if these particular smart plugs, which, like their seemingly more reliable HS103 precursors, are 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi-only, were somehow getting confused by one or more of the several relatively unique quirks of my Google Nest Wifi wireless network:
- The 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi SSIDs broadcast by any node are the same name, and
- Being a mesh configuration, all nodes (both stronger-signal nearby and weaker, more distant, to which clients sometimes connect instead) also have the exact same SSID
Regardless, I couldn’t get them to work no matter what I tried, so I sent them back for a refund…
Location awareness
…only to then have the bright idea that it’d be cool to take both an HS103 and an EP10 apart and see if there was any hardware deviation that might explain the functional discrepancy. So, I picked up another EP10 combo, this one a two-pack. And on a “third time’s the charm” hunch (and/or maybe just fueled by stubbornness), I tried setting one of them up again. Of course, it worked just fine this time
This time, I decided to try a new use case: controlling a table lamp in our dining room that automatically turned on at dusk and turned off again the next morning. We’d historically used an archaic mechanical timer for lamp power control, an approach not only noisy in operation but which also needed to be re-set after each premises electricity outage, since the timer didn’t embed a rechargeable battery to act as a temporary backup power source and keep time:
The mechanical timer was also clueless about the varying sunrise and sunset times across the year, not to mention the twice-yearly daylight saving time transitions. Its smart plug successor, which knows where it is and what day and time it is (whenever it’s powered up and network-connected, of course), has no such limitations:
Rebrands and migrations
Spec changes…inconsistent setup outcomes…there’s one more bit of oddity to share in closing. As this video details:
“Kasa” was TP-Link’s original smart home device brand, predominantly marketed and sold in North America. The company, for reasons that remain unclear to me and others, subsequently, in parallel, rolled out another product line branded as “Tapo” across the rest of the world. Even today, if you revisit the “smart plugs” product page on TP-Link’s website, whose link I first shared earlier in this writeup, you’ll see a mix of Kasa- and Tapo-branded products. The same goes for wall switches, light bulbs, cameras, and other TP-Link smart home devices. And historically, you needed to have both mobile apps installed to fully control a mixed-brand setup in your home.
Fortunately, TP-Link has made some notable improvements of late, from which I’m reading between the lines and deducing that a full transition to Tapo is the ultimate intended outcome. As I tested and confirmed for myself just a couple of days ago, it’s now possible to manage both legacy Kasa and newer Tapo devices using the same Tapo app; they also leverage a common TP-Link user account:
They all remain visible to Alexa, too, and there’s a separate Tapo skill that can also be set up:
along with, as with Kasa, support for other services:
Further hands-on evaluation
To wit, driven by curiosity as to whether device functional deviations are being fueled by (in various cases) hardware differences, firmware-only tweaks or combinations of the two, I’ve taken advantage of a 30%-off Black Friday (week) promotion to also pick up a variety of other TP-Link smart plugs from Amazon’s Resale (formerly Warehouse) area, for both functional and teardown analysis in the coming months:
- Kasa EP25 (added Apple HomeKit support, also with energy monitoring)
- Tapo P105 (seeming Tapo equivalent to the Kasa EP10)
- Tapo P110M (Matter compatible, also with energy monitoring)
- Tapo P115 (energy monitoring)
- Tapo P125 (added Apple HomeKit support)
Some of these devices look identical to others, at least from the outside, while in other cases dimensions and button-and-LED locations differ product-to-product. But for us engineers, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Stand by for further writeups in this series throughout 2026. And until then, let me know your thoughts on what I’ve covered so far in the comments!
—Brian Dipert is the Principal at Sierra Media and a former technical editor at EDN Magazine, where he still regularly contributes as a freelancer.
Related Content
- How smart plugs can make your life easier and safer
- Teardown: Smart plug adds energy consumption monitoring
- Teardown: A Wi-Fi smart plug for home automation
- Teardown: Smart switch provides Bluetooth power control
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