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Eero iPhone Connectivity Issues

Hello, 

I have not yet purchased an Eero system yet; I am in the research stages deciding between Google Wifi, Orbi, Luma, Unify mesh, Amplifi, and Velop. 

I have seen many reviews and threads in forums in regards to Apple IOS devices failing to 'roam' between APs, or randomly dropping connections, or staying connected to the furthest AP rather than switching to the closest one. 

A couple years back I set up a $1000 Cisco Meraki AP for my home network. After countless issue with our iPhones and iPads not being able to connect, not seeing the SSIDs, and randomly dropping connections I switched back to my $100 Asus router, which has superior performance (for Apple devices) to the enterprise grade AP. I am looking for a modern WiFi solution to power all of our devices, including many Apple devices.

In any case, it seams Apple devices always have issues with WiFi, I am looking for a solid solution to this, I thought Eero was the winner until I started reading it also has the same issues with Apple. I have read that people have open cases with Eero regarding this, but it's still a known issue. 

At my office we have a ton of Enterprise Cisco APs, in which iPhones can seamlessly roam between without loosing a video call. Obviously at the price point of Eero we cannot expect enterprise grade features, but I am looking for some input if others are having this issue with their iPhones on Eero, and what support / development teams are doing to solve this issue? 

One other item of interest is outdoor WiFi coverage. With other mesh WiFi options on the market; outdoor weather resistant APs are offered. Does Eero have any intentions or future plans to offer the addition of outdoor APs to the mesh network? 

Thanks in advance. 

252 replies

    • miamojo
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Unfortunately not fixed for me. I think the problem is less constant- but I have wildly fluctuating speeds and pretty frequent need to toggle WiFi. As always, upon a restart of the network, there is increased stability for an hour or so but then the problems return.

    Anyone find this software update resolved the issues?

      • rtlee
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      miamojo See my post below yours. Right now I'm not focusing on connectivity speed - going to fast.com it starts real slow like a few Mbps for the first few seconds, then ramps up and up until somewhere between 30 - 240 Mbps, depending on where I am in the house (I get 230-240 Mbps from Ethernet). That is pretty consistent with what I've been getting even before this issue started. I plan to address the speed issue with Eero support eventually, but right now top priority for me is getting a connection that doesn't drop out...

      • miamojo
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      rtlee My speeds are consistent with yours and I also have Xfinity (200 Mbps down,15 up).  I would completely agree- the speed variations are certainly tolerable for most things, but the constant drop in connections definitely isn't. I am headed now into my last few days of being able to return my system, and I'm not sure what to do. I had Netgear extenders(not the Orbi) which brought my speed down considerably(topping out at 60 if I was literally right next to an extender) but at least I stayed connected. I feel the potential of the eero and when it works smoothly, for that hour or so after a network restart, I feel like it would be a step backwards to go back to those extenders and I think I can wait it out but as I've been typing this, the connection has dropped twice while my son has been watching YouTube- that's twice in three minutes. It's really bad. I think the problem exists for the Orbi and Google WiFI and all the others, so I don't think I would try another system either until I read reports of solid connectivity with iOS. 

    • rtlee
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Update: It's been 9 hours since I updated to the beta firmware. It's still too early for me to tell if this is fixed or an improvement. I tend to think so far that it has improved. As I roam the house and move from AP to AP I can see the antenna icon drop one "wave" and then go back to 3 ways as it hands off to the next AP.  Whereas sometimes before it would drop me back to LTE in that case.  While inside the house I did not have any outage once connected. However I did have issue with it - when I was away from home earlier today I turned wifi off because of a poor Xfinity wifi hotspot I was picking up while away.  So when I returned home I noticed I was on LTE because Wifi was off, as to be expected.  However when I turned wifi back on, it switched from LTE to my local network, but I had no internet connection even after a few moments. I had to turn wifi off and back on, and then I had a good connection again. My early hunch is that things may have been improved but not 100% resolved. I will keep you guys posted. 

    • Gravity Brings Me Down...
    • stevebaker
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Greetings again - and thanks for the beta push last night. It's been almost 12 hours for me thus far with the beta 3.4.0-442 firmware across my 6 eero setup. Thus far, with casual use of my iPhone 7+ (Intel modem, not Qualcomm, if that matters) I've encountered no issues yet. Fingers crossed!

    With the prior firmware, I would need to toggle off/on the Wifi about twice a day, which is certainly not a significant issue, but worrisome nonetheless. Wifi calling is not enabled, either before or after.

    Regarding speeds, I haven't spent much time exploring that but a few tests show that everything is still humming along just fine (no change, with my expected 125 down, 24 up still coming through).

      • mattv123
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      stevebaker good news! I am traveling and won’t be able to test again until Monday but I now have the test build loaded on my system as well.

      Fingers crossed your experience is stable and I find the same next week!

    • travisbell
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    My iPhone has lost WiFi twice now. By lost I mean it's the same symptom as before, WiFi is killed and I drop back to LTE.

    But there is a difference that I noticed between 3.3 and 3.4. On 3.3 it would take iOS a long time to recover, so long that as we've all said, we've got in the habit of toggling WiFi off and back on. The two times it has happened on 3.4, it was almost instantaneous. I did not have to toggle WiFi as iOS recovered within seconds. Could just be a random difference but I don't remember iOS ever recovering that fast on its own on 3.3. 

      • mattv123
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      travisbell Does this happen when you are actively using the phone? Or do you only notice it when you unlock it from sleep at your home?

      iOS does a ton of weird stuff with the Wi-Fi radio to save battery using (from what I have found) various different timers and conditions both in and out of device sleep mode.  I have also found that the device may appear to switch to cellular via the status bar UI indicators, but in fact remains connected to the Wi-Fi network according to the network stack.

      So if you are seeing LTE for a brief time and usability isn't actually impacted, then its probably just iOS doing its "thing".  I think the best way to tell is to run a ping to your router from an app on your phone and look for network dropouts to determine if the association is actually dropping, or if this is just a UI thing.  The idea here is that a transition to LTE or an association drop will result in lost packets.  You can also try pinging to your phone from another machine on your network (e.g. your Mac/PC), though be aware it is normal for the device to drop off the network and stop responding to pings if it enters sleep mode.

      Keen to hear what you find!

      • travisbell
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      mattv123 Both times it was connected to WiFi prior and I was in the middle of using it but I had moved in the house. It's the same time it would have dropped the signal for good on 3.3 when I suspect it was switching AP's. From that perspective nothing is different. Just in the middle using it. 

      I'll continue to monitor it. I've told everyone in the house to try and pay attention too :D

    • afx114
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Same, 3.4 for me is "better" in that it seems to transition through WiFi => 4G => WiFi more seamlessly, but I've still had to manually toggle WiFi off/on a handful of times.

    I can reproduce the issue 100% of the time, following a specific route through locations (Basement => Upstairs to Bedroom => Then to Kitchen => WiFi Dies).  Not sure if that would be of any help.

    • pclaar
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Nope. 3.4 is locking my phone's WiFi up. It only took one take to get a video:

    https://youtu.be/rJSNp8NzD0Y

      • travisbell
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      pclaar Ya, that is a video of my experience. When I said earlier that WiFi came back faster, I only meant that the WiFi returned from being on LTE faster. I never actually specifically checked the time it took to have a working network connection again. You can very conveniently see that with that app. 

      I'm going to grab it and walk around now.  Thanks for sharing. 

      • pclaar
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      travisbell For others, here's a link to the app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wi-fi-sweetspots/id855457383?mt=8

    • eero Community Manager
    • Jeff_C
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Official response
    • Reported - view

    Thank you to all those helping to test this build and sharing your experiences here.

    In order for us to properly track how things are going with your experience, please be sure to provide any feedback to our support team. Simply reply to your most recent ticket, and our team will relay it back to engineering. Thanks again!

      • bdplatt
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Jeff C. have replied to support. Fundamentally no change. If I walk around on my first floor for 30 seconds I can make WiFi go away. Because cell signal is bad at my house that means I can make the internet go COMPLETELY away, even though I’m standing 3 feet from a beacon, and can see another Eero on the other side of the house. 

       

      Bummer, wish this was the fix.....

      • rtlee
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Jeff C. It would be great if your dev and support team actively monitored this forum so that we do not have to keep reporting our results twice - here and then via emailing support.

      • lwdupont
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      rtlee I'm only replying to support, so they hopefully can look at logs when issues happen. It's been better for me, just a few drop outs that seem to fix themselves faster. 

    • rtlee
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I had a dropout from Wifi to LTE today while sitting 2 feet from the main Eero. A few moments later it reconnected without me having to turn wifi on/off. I echo the sentiments of some other testers - it does seem to recoup on its own better and faster, but is still dropping out. Thanks for the links to the Wifi sweepspots app - will check it out.

    • rtlee
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Update 3: When returning home today I was connected to Wifi but no internet. Had to switch wifi on/off a few times. I have a connection now but fast.com shows only 1.3 Mpbs so really poor compared to the 30-240Mbps I usually get. I keep trying and am getting these slow speeds like 890 Kbps and "could not reach fast.com server" type messages during the test. Sorry to say but now that it's been about 24 hours I'd have to say this beta software hasn't seemed to improve my wifi issues much at all. At least we know the Eero team is on top of it trying to resolve it, so I'm hopeful they'll resolve it soon.

    • miamojo
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Oddly, since a restart last night, I appear to have far more connection stability. I’ve had the eero update for several days already. Will continue to monitor. No update on iOS software either and I have consistently needed to toggle WiFi every few minutes before last night. Maybe just another tease, as there is no explanation for it.

    • rtlee
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    After using this beta update now for 2 days I can say that it makes little if any difference, as I (and other family members) am still having the same issues as reported by others here.

      • bdplatt
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      rtlee Did some testing for support today. Interestingly, my iPhone 7Plus (on iOS 11 gm), and iPad Pro REGULARLY have wifi cease functioning. On the GM though, they recover on their own (so sometimes I might not notice there was an issue unless streaming something).

      My daughters iPhone 7 Plus on 10.2.1 & 10.3.3 would never COMPLETELY lose the connection, but it would get VERY slow, and then never recover to previous speeds. So if you asked her, she'd just say our internet SUCKS, because it's so slow all the time.

      Also interesting to me was that MacOS doesn't SEEM to have the same issue. A few pings were dropped while walking around, but only 3-5 at a time, and then all would be good again.

      Hope we can get another build of the 3.4.0 that keeps make improvements and addresses both issues my family is seeing. 

      • rtlee
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      bdplatt Thanks for the detailed info! As I recently reported, I've seen much of the same problems so the beta firmware hasn't seemed to help much if any. Possibly it recovers a bit easier, but I still have several dropouts and have to resort to toggling Wifi. A few times now I have returned home to find that it connects to the Wifi but has no connection, and I have to toggle Wifi. That seems new with this firmware (coming home and not getting a good connection to start). Tho this does not happen each time I return home. As you can read about below I am nearing the point of moving on with another product, but that will be a costly switch.

    • Armydoc214
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Well, I ran in to another problem tonight.  My wife and son were trying to access their Google drives but consistently being blocked.  We subscribe to the EERO plus so this may be the issue.  She had to tether to her iPhone to access her Google Drive.  I haven't been home to test my phone but I'm sure the beta didn't make much of a difference.  We have a lot of buffering when on wifi calling.

    • mattv123
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Unfortunately, experiencing many of the same issues as reported above.  

    • Very strong performance for some period of time.
    • Then weirdly slow connections after some period of time.  Fixed with WiFi toggle; other devices not having any problem at the same point in time.
    • Network route is dropping to LTE but WiFi is still associated but with "No Internet Connection" and no IP address assigned (Renew DHCP Lease doesn't help).
    • Sometimes Wi-Fi recovers, others it stays in this locked out condition until a manual Wi-Fi toggle.

    I had removed the WiFi debugging profile from my iOS device so I didn't capture any good logs.  I re-installed and will try to replicate tomorrow and see if we are still getting broadcom errors.

    I updated my ticket with Eero with the above information, so hopefully it helps them continue on with the debugging as we definitely are not fixed with this build (esp given the other reports).

    Glass half full assessment: the behavior is definitely different so eero engineers seem to be playing around with the right part of the code in which this problem exists.  Hopefully the next build will be that much closer!

Content aside

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