I’ve been having an issue where the Ethernet on my Eero Pro 6 will go down, but the Wi-Fi still works. At first I thought it was an issue with my unmanaged Ethernet switch, but now I’m not so sure.

My set up is that I have fiber ONT to Ethernet going into my gateway Eero. That Eero then connects by Ethernet to an unmanaged Ethernet switch, which then runs backhaul Ethernet to my two other Eeros.

That works fine… until suddenly it won’t. When it stops working everything on the network will be unable to connect to the internet. When this happens and the eeros are trying to use Ethernet backhaul everything (wired and Ethernet) stops working. Sometimes when this happens the eeros will automatically switch into wireless backhaul and then anything connected to the eeros over Wi-Fi will work, but anything connected to the eeros over Ethernet will keep failing to connect. Unplugging my unmanaged switch (in other words, just turning off the whole Ethernet backhaul) and moving over to entirely wireless eeros fixes the problem. When I plug the Ethernet switch back in, everything usually works again (sometimes for a few hours, sometimes a few days, sometimes a few months) but eventually the problem returns.

At first I suspected the unmanaged switch. I had the TP-Link SG105 5 port unmanaged switch. Initially I thought maybe the switch had gone bad, so I replaced it with another SG105. It would work for a maybe a month or so, then the problem would return.

After going through three SG105s, I thought I’d try a different one. So I got a Linksys SE3005. This had problems immediately. I then googled around and learned that this Linksys and several other unmanaged switches include IGMP, which can lead to issues with Eeros. So I found a switch on these forums that supposedly did not have IGMP: Netgear 8 port GS308. However, after 2 days, the Ethernet stopped working again.

At this point, I’m not sure the issue is the unmanaged switch. I’ve tried 5 different switches, 3 different models, and over the course of a year this problem keeps coming back. The weird thing is that the issue usually doesn’t happen immediately when I plug in the switch. The system can work for as much as a month or two before it stops working.

Any advice?