Eero Pro mesh wifi (2nd gen) is Da Bomb!

Audio Gear Talk
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I’m a big believer in hardwiring network connections whenever possible. Especially for audio. However a little over a year ago I had to rip all the Cat 5 cable down from the sides of my house, and remove and plaster over all the RJ45 jacks inside my house. Long story that. Anyway…

I found myself moving data long distances over my house with WiFi. What a nightmare that has been. Even with three expensive routers, it’s just been one long, non-stop problem. Until yesterday.

One of the routers (actually a repeater) started really acting up. Something had to give. So I went out and got the Eero Pro mesh WiFi kit, the new 2nd generation one. Wow. I am so impressed!

My measured download speeds are now 10-15% faster than they are supposed to be at their fastest. That NEVER happened with my old Asus routers. Not even close. And the network speed of the important parts of the house (office, TV room, music room) is just screaming. And you can walk from room to room to room with a device streaming video, and never experience a hiccup with total household coverage. Any hand-offs are totally transparent.

I’m pretty familiar with local area networking, so I have to admit though that I am having to get used to the lack of transparency into what’s going on. It does not tell you much. Nor do you get to tailor much either. You want to manage QOS? Sorry. It does that on its own, and does not let you tinker with it. Need a DMZ? Sorry. Other than setting timezone, SSID and your WiFi password, there’s not a lot it’ll let you tinker with by default. At least in its advanced settings you can setup DNS, set up NAT, tinker a bit with DHCP, reserve IP’s, port forwarding, and control UPnP (allowed or not). So you’ve got the basics, but nothing exotic. Which is fine for my needs. And it’s got a guest network (everything does now) and you can set network down times with “profiles”. But any content or add filtering, or advanced network reports require a $99/year subscription. So I’ll be living without that.

Even still it’s pretty nice. As I type this, Eero is seeing 67 Mbps download speeds, and my PC is getting 66. That’s not too bad considering that I’m a couple of router hops away from the primary router. Not to mention being two floors away, at the opposite end of the house… about as far away from the primary router as I can get.

I’m in no way connected with Eero. But just in case anyone out there is going through WiFi pain like I was, I’d strongly recommend taking a look at the 2nd Gen Eero Pro kit. Suddenly WiFi turned into what it should have been decades ago: simple. And working.

Oh, and Roon works great too. :slight_smile:

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My own experience has been similar. I’ve been using a 1st Gen eero system for better part of a year now and also feel that it’s the best, most trouble free household WiFi experience I’ve had. Had needed to upgrade from an old Airport base station system and am thankful that I stumbled across eero during my search. I’ve never looked back.

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Glad to hear about the long term happiness. Thanks for posting.

My house is a tough to cover house, so I went with the “Pro” pack. And even then, if you look at some of the devices in some rooms (at some distance from a router) some only show three of the possible five signal strength bars in the list of devices in the Eero app. But amazingly, even in those “poor” coverage areas, I can still stream video, no sweat.

Clearly this is a nice product. Expensive. But costs less than the set of routers I just retired. I could not be more tickled.

Thanks for sharing @jonathan . :wink:

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Am I right in thinking this is still US only?

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Wow. That’s a good question. Company’s been around a couple of years now. so you’d think they’d have branched out. But on their website it looks like US and Canada. Bummer.

Sorry. 'Cuz this is WiFi the way it should have been when the standard was adopted by IEEE twenty years ago. It works. And it’s stupid simple. It’s taken a long time to get us to that point. But it’s here now, though possibly only for the US and Canada. :frowning:

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What is the benefit of doing the three eero pro bundle vs eero and beacons, (other than the extra Ethernet ports that is), Power of the units?

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Yup. Other than the ports - which were important to me - it’s all about additional power AND speed. With my difficult to get full coverage house, I went for more power. And d*mn if it didn’t work out great!

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Just noticed that the beacons are only dual band where as the eero is tri-band. So there is another advantage to the three eero pro set-up. I suppose?
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As an aside… when 802.11 was first proposed by the IEEE, I was doing network support for a company that was the first company to move real-time market data over the Internet. And we had one particularly smart guy - Anindya “Indy” Banerjee - who did something like wrote about the superiority of mesh networks for his master’s thesis, as I recall. Anyway… Indy was really, really unhappy with the IEEE’s network topology used by 802.11. He was insistent that mesh was far superior, and posited that over time 802.11’s inferior topology would be replaced by mesh topologies.

Well Indy. Looks like you were right. We’re there now. :+1:

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Oops! Sorry. Forgot about that. That particular feature is one reason why I bit the bullet. I was sold on that. Though my only fear is that as other vendors begin to use that same third frequency for router-to-router back haul traffic. That frequency will get crowded also. If that happens, then my Eero is fast now, with a slower future. That would be a bummer.

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Oops. Should have been more specific… it’s not that it’s a tri-band, per se. It’s that the routers do all their router to router chatter on the third band, keeping 2.4 and 5 GHz open exclusively used for moving data.

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Might have to try this out. My Mom has been complaining about WiFi drop outs with her Netgear router and the Hawkings extender I got for her died. Not sure what they did to it. Have not had a chance to investigate yet.

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Well, I’m in a three floor, 2,700 sq. ft. house, and the Pro pack has me totally covered. Drop outs appear to be a thing of the past. And it’s so simple, a child could set it up. Mostly.

The one - and only - place I ran into trouble was the devices I had static addressed. I had to isolate those on a separate LAN, change them to DHCP, put them back on the Eero network and use the app to find the device and tell Eero to reserve that IP. So technically they are not statically addressed anymore. But the address reservation means they’ll always have the same address. And that’s all I really cared about.

Bottom line… from my experience, an absolutely painless setup depends on all your nodes using DHCP to get their addresses.

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This is from my Eero Gen 1 setup. Both measurements (at the eero base port) and on an ipad on the far sde of the house (via speedtest).

Stuff really works…

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Awesome! :+1:

343 Mbps? Really? Are you running a server farm in your house, or what?

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Woa! Hold everything… Apparently there is a BIG problem with Eero’s that I was not aware of.

Eero has been working great with all our devices. But those that stay in one place, like an Echo Dot, and those that roam (laptops, macbooks, phones, etc.) However, my iPad had been out of commission since before I got the Eero, and I only got it back today. And it absolutely had problems moving between routers. Not always. But with some frequency. And when it drops the connection, the only way to get it connected again is open Setting/Wifi, and select my networks SSID. It’s quite a PITA.

After a bit of research, it seems a lot of people are having similar problems, and that it started with IOS 11. And that explains why our iPhones roam so flawlessly - they are iPhone 5’s, which cannot move past IOS 10.33.

So, IMO this is a pretty big deal. I’ve no doubt they’ll be able to fix it. But for anyone reading this, if you’ve got IOS 11 devices (like my iPad) I would DEFINITELY Google to see if this problem is fixed before purchasing any Eero products.

So much for my perfect mesh network. :frowning:

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That’s too bad.

I have had great success so far using Linksys Velop 2-node system. Running all devices on iOS 11…no issues.

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Thanks for the recommendation. But I’m gonna stick to the Eero.

From what I’ve googled, the problem appears to be caused by Apple, but can be fixed by Eero. But it’s hard. And they’ve been trying for a while. At the end of the day, this is a total show stopper for their business. So I’m confident they’ll fix it. IMO their only alternative is to go out of business.

So I’ll patiently wait. Thanks.

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I have 2 iPhones, 3 iPads and 1 iWatch. All updated to the latest IOS 11.1.1 and they all work fine on a complete EERO system. 4 EEROS and one bBeacon in a 5500 sq ft farm house. All my other wifi devices also work fine, no problems any where within 20 - 50 fit of my house. Nearest house is about 4000ft away, so no neighbor giving me problems however. Maybe yours are giving you problems.

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Nope… it’s not about neighbors. It’s how Apple handles moving between access points in IOS 11. Granted, there appear to be people out there - like yourself - that have no problem. That’s great that you are one of those. But it’s an acknowledged problem by Eero. Google it and see what the folks at Eero have had to say over at Reddit.

And I started a chat with their tech support, to see what the status if their fix effort was. I was told…

“We do not formally have a rock solid solution however we have many Apple engineers from their dismantled router program actively seeking a solution everyday. As soon as we fine a solution we can always reach out to you and inform you if you prefer.”

So it’s great to hear that everyone does not have the problem. But it is a real, acknowledged, and apparently a bit vexing issue.