To current eero owners, how did you get here? What competing products did you test? Will you stay with eero?

adambean
7 yrs ago
60replies

Hey all,

Day 2 of being an eero owner, and unsure yet If it's for me. Really curious to hear from current owners.

I come from a relatively solid tech background, while not fluent in all things networking, I know more than enough to be dangerous. I live in a 2,500 sq ft home with a 1,300 something basement. I have ethernet run to almost every room in the house. I've had a couple different setups in my time that inevitably have caused me grief in one way or another.

As of yesterday, I was running a single Asus AC5300 router, which hit the whole house and partial outdoors, relatively well. 5ghz did not have much of a reach and at times the latency on my 2.4 was not ideal. More often than not, the network was solid, but random hiccups between streaming buffering, my wife's laptop dropping VPN, and other little misc. nuances just became annoying to the point that I wanted to try something new.

I realize I could/should probably stick with my current router and impliment some Unifi' AP's given that I have the ability to do so with having Cat5e run through the entire house. Still debating the option, but honestly ... it's more work and I'm feeling lazy these days.

So yesterday I went and brought a Netgear Orbi as all things considered, they seemed to the best of the new/cool kids club of home networking solutions. I ultimately only lasted on Orbi for about 5 hours due to a multitude of frustrations. Between the latest firmware breaking connectivity to the satellites, a very slow and painful interface, dropping network connection on mobile when switching satellites, poor choices being made on devices connecting to satellites, lack of ethernet backhaul with no timeline (lots of posts on their forums), and the physical appearance of the Orbi satellites ... all helped for me to give up on it.

I ran out to BestBuy last night and picked up the eero Pro three pack last night. Overall, was pretty pleased with how quick and easy it was to setup. Had several hiccups with devices not being detected which simply required some reboots, but all in all, very easy and painless. The system is up and working like a champ, but I have some issues/concerns as of now:

1) The hot temperatures of the devices themselves
2) eero+ costs $10 a month; whereas competitors offer this service for free
3) eero is a kickstarter born company, will they last?
4) Mobile only app
5) Limiting configuration options
6) Lack of utilization data
7) Lack of QoS
8) No logging/debug
9) Devices are making poor decisions on which node to connect to
10) No enhanced functionality like VPN, local/cloud storage accessibility, etc.
11) Range isn't as good as one would hope/expect

I mean in the end, I get it. eero is meant for today's typical, non tecchy family. Yet, it seems like so much more could be possible with this system but enabling some "advanced" features/functionality. I question if any of that will happen?

Anyway, this was definitely a long winded rant. Really just curious to hear from others. I realize I should probably just go buy a couple AP's and call it a day, but I like what eero is doing here. I want to say this is the right choice, but I really just wish there was more features and functionality.

Thanks

- Steve1963
- 6 yrs ago
- Reported - view
Oh - regarding your comments about lack of configuration options with Eero, whether we'll stay with it, etc.....

I get your frustrations about the lack of configurability. A lot of people have complained about the lack of an ability to split the SSID into separate 2.4 and 5GHz networks. That has its advantages and is convenient in controlling what devices attach to which network. Orbi offers LOTS of config options - problem is, many of them don't work properly, or cause problems when you enable them - like Mu-MIMO, beamforming, etc on Orbi which made things worse when I enabled them, only to have support tell me to turn them back off - which made me wonder why the options were there in the first place.

I think Eero's goal is to offer the user an exceptionally stable, consistent, reliable system, and my guess is they've limited changes and options that they believe might compromise this. All the configurability in the world is not helpful to me if the system's not reliable and I can't trust it. So, I am OK with the trade-offs to have a system I can rely on and where I know I can access my cameras, NAS files, etc when and where I need to. The nice thing is, I can access the system remotely (unlike Airport) and take action if I see a node fall off line or just want visibility to what's happening. I will also say that Eero seems to band-steer extremely well, and my PC's and 5GHz-capable devices always seem to attach to the 5GHz band.

On the range, I think Eero claims 1,000 sq. ft per node, which seems about right. Think about it, many of its competitors (like Amped Ally, I believe) claim a crazy 15,000 sq. ft of coverage with two nodes. Unless you're in an open field, that's not going to happen. I would rather have them make conservative but accurate coverage claims than boisterous ones that don't live up to the hype. I don't see Eero really having worse range per node than anything else I have seen. It has more antennas per unit than most of its competitors.

One wish is that I would like to be able to drill into each Eero and quickly see which devices are attached to it. Right now, you have to go into each individual device to see which Eero it's attached to.

I like that I can quickly and seamlessly add nodes to the mesh as I need to, with no impact to stability or connectivity elsewhere in the network. Would be nice however if they could add a third band to the Beacons, as the regular Eeros in my testing (2nd gen.) are much faster than the two-band Beacons.

I will stay with Eero for now, though am concerned about future speed limitations with current hardware, since right now their 5GHz band is de-facto limited to 600 Mb/s, with some higher-end routers offering much, much faster speeds.
- cMoo92
  
  6 yrs ago
  
  Reported - view
  Steve1963 in regards to your last statement about concerns about the future of the speed of the hardware, I would like to point out that those “high end routers” are using theoretical numbers that will never be achieved in the real world. And when was the last time you actually needed even 600Mbps for a wireless device on your network? :)
  
  If you really need those speeds in your home, your devices should probably be hardwired.
- Steve1963
  
  6 yrs ago
  
  Reported - view
  cMoo92 I don't know if I'd ever say "never". There was a time that I remember well back in the early 90's, when a 500 MB hard drive was considered HUGE and no one at that time could even imagine the need for a gigabyte. Now we have 10 and 12 terabyte drives. Or need I mention the 56K phone line modem!?
  
  Those speeds come in handy with large file transfers, etc. Not everyone can afford or has the infrastructure to ethernet wire their home - kind of the whole point of these mesh systems is to bypass having to hardwire. If I were ethernet wired, I could just install access points.
  
  There are AD7200 routers with 60 GHz/4600 Mb/s capability. Few client devices support that now, but they will.
- MrDoh
- 6 yrs ago
- Reported - view
I have both eero and Orbi. I got Orbi first, and then had some difficulties with it with auto-update for firmware that insisted on putting me on firmware that didn't work well for me. I figured out how to block Orbi firmware auto-update, but got tired of that, so switched to eero. My problem with eero is that I have to be able to reach the internet to be able to do anything with the app other than re-build the whole network, and I have to be able to reach the internet to delete the eero network, which I've been able to work around mostly. But I feel at this point that I have to have eero in AP (bridge) mode so that there is an internet connection to be able to do stuff with the eero. Eero could deal with that by providing a local admin facility that would allow me to do a few things with the network that doesn't require being on the internet. Like I couldn't switch from bridge to automatic modes because the eero app couldn't reach the internet, so I had to delete the whole eero network and re-build it to switch from bridge mode to automatic which is much more time-consuming than just being able to switch it and reboot my cable modem.

So what I'm feeling right now is that the eero (and Orbi, for that matter) make great wireless AP's, but I need another router as a "main router" that's connected to the internet so that I can connect to the eero or Orbi via ethernet cable and do what I need to do without having to re-build everything from the ground up when I decide to change the configuration.

Not sure if I'm staying with either one, I am enjoying having the choice. And I would jump on a third realistic choice that had the wireless mesh functionality, yet allowed me to change things without an internet connection. Haven't found that one yet.
- kika
- 6 yrs ago
- Reported - view
Was easy for me, Amazon shipped somebody else's eero to me, I contacted Amazon to return it back and they said thank you, keep it. So I kept. The initial experience was rather rough, with lot's of FW updates then it stabilized and was 100% maintenance free for a long time until they released long-anticipated ipv6 support and now I have intermittent connection drops on Apple devices :-(
- cMoo92
  
  6 yrs ago
  
  Reported - view
  kika have you contacted support about the issue you’re having with ipv6 on?
- kika
  
  6 yrs ago
  
  Reported - view
  cMoo92 Not yet, just came here to see if it's a known problem.
- eero Community Manager
  
  Jeff_C
  
  6 yrs ago
  
  Reported - view
  kika Please contact support. We'll be happy to take a look and help resolve the issue. You can give us a call at 877-659-2347 or email support@eero.com . Thanks!
- Raphael
- 6 yrs ago
- Reported - view
nice post!

I share some of the same concerns too.

I bought the eero 3 pack. Previously had 3 Apple Airport Extreme (latest gen, the tall ones).

All are connected to ethernet.

Both setups were pretty easy. I don't really see an upgrade in performance with the eero.

2) eero+ costs $10 a month; whereas competitors offer this service for free

I second that. All I want eero+ is monitoring/advanced settings. I don't care about the bundled software. Could we make an Eero+ subscription without any extra software addon? It seems like the price could drop by 10 fold.

6) Lack of utilization data

this would be great!
- Ryan_db
- 6 yrs ago
- Reported - view
Just wanted to post our results from business use. We bought 3 eero pro packs (9 eeros total) and so far everything has been fantastic! We use it in a large warehouse + office environment with a fairly complex network and 100+ devices including a LAN operated VoIP sip trunk. All of the eeros are connected via Ethernet backhaul.

Even though the eero is sold and advertised as a "whole home" WiFi solution, I think it could definitely be advertised as an easy to manage small business solution too. The only thing that would be a nice addition is PPPoE but we were able to get a workaround for our static IP.

We initially looked at upgrading our old router + access points to the Orbi Pro system but soon discovered that it only supports a maximum of 3 additional "satellites". Since eero does not have this limitation we went with this system and haven't looked back since!

Well done to the eero team at making fantastic WiFi hardware!
- Scott.2
- 5 yrs ago
- Reported - view
Well I'm no pro. All my previous routers (at least 5) were all the best rated for their times and it seemed I was ALWAYS having to do the unplug-replug modem first then router....blah blah routine. I caught wind of the eero project and got in on their pre-order offer (when was that 2015?). I have never looked back, just set it and forget it. I never have to think about connecting anymore.