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eero Labs features and feedback thread

Welcome to the eero Labs features and feedback thread!

Here is your place to share your experiences with new eero Labs feature releases, as well as let us know the types of future concepts you'd like to see here. We encourage you to share your feedback and interact with others, as well as have an opportunity to interact directly with our developers.

While this section will be more focused on connectivity related features, you can also submit general feature requests here.

For more on eero Labs, visit the eero help center.

1097 replies

    • TexBuck
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Smart Queue Management Beta Feedback

    I run multiple Xbox 1 on my eero network, so the feature sounded beneficial and I tried running it for 3 days.  Unfortunately it needs work and I needed to turn it off.

     

    -  I am getting data corruption on downloads.  It took me 5 attempts to get a relatively small game update (~100MB)  to successfully download without corruption.

    - Had a similar problem with a 4.7GB Xbox system update, corrupted and couldn't pass data validation, turned off Smart Queue and worked fine.

    First time I had ever experienced this type of issue on eero.

    - My son has been experienced several drops a day in Internet that would boot him off the game and had to restart.  

     

    Removing Smart Queue seems to have helped.  

     

    A feature to lock an device to a certain eero and frequency would be great.  Sometimes my consoles swap (get swapped) to a further eero base station or go from 2.4 to 5 GHz range.  That change during  a game kicks you out.  I would like to be able to tie a console (doesn't move) to a specific eero and range (2.4 GHz is plenty of bandwidth for on line gaming and much stronger - as you know)

      • microChasm
      • 1 yr ago
      • Reported - view

      TexBuck I’ve had the same experience with the ‘Optimize for  conferencing and gaming’ feature enabled.

      • Calion
      • 1 yr ago
      • Reported - view

      microChasm Interesting. I’ve not run into trouble downloading tons of stuff on my PS4.

      • Cujoman187
      • 1 yr ago
      • Reported - view

      TexBuck I haven't had these issues with my Xbox but I have noticed that my Xbox downloads stuff rather stupidity though. For one it only downloads one thing at a time which my PS4 Pro downloads multiple games at the same time and the speeds it downloads at are always much higher than my Xbox. My Xbox sometimes downloads at 200+ mbps then it will drop way down to like 20 mbps for no reason at all then go back up. Sometimes I have to pause the download to get it to go back up again. It's very annoying especially when I've got a gigahertz internet service. Every single game should be downloading way faster than what they do. It's almost like Xbox is throttling my download speeds down. What's the point in paying for good internet if these stupid consoles throttle you down to nothing? I should really just get back into PC gaming and get my PC back up and going cause these consoles really suck in multiple different ways! 

    • RF Engineer
    • atm0sphere814
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Any chance the eero Labs features will make it to systems that are in bridge mode? I have a dedicated firewall between my gateway and my eero mesh network.

      • diomark
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      atm0sphere814 Ditto - exactly. My setup doesn't allow for having the eero wifi routers NOT in bridge mode:( but some of these functionalities have nothing to do with nat/firewalls/etc..

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

      atm0sphere814  and diomark

      Thanks for reaching out! If we release any future features for eero Labs that wouldn't require a network to be out of bridge mode, those features would be available to all networks. At that time, we'll update the requirements of eero Labs for specific features.

    • zubinanary
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Great job on introducing this eero Labs feature.  I think it's going to be amazing as you release new feature here so we can test before it goes GA for everyone to use...

    • Jd3913
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Hey guys - love the idea of SQM. Have had it on for a week or so with no issues except today, while downloading three large files (about 2GB each) the transfer randomly slowed to 43kbps at about 50% completion. I stopped the transfer and started over, no luck. I turned off SQM and started the transfer over and back to full speed. Just wanted to contribute in case it helps with tuning this feature. This occurred on an iMac running Transmit, connected to a beacon. 

    • Adecastr
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Thank you so much for all the great work!!

    Would it be possible in the future to add an option called eero profile?

    Like the family profiles?

    Where you could select one of the eero's to go offline from 20:00 until 07:00 am?

    I say this because during the night I would love tobe able to disable one or two eero's.

    Thank you!

    • Adecastr
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Or an option to disable the wireless in the eero from 20:00 until 07:00 am and having the cable connection on at the same time.

    • Mike_K
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I enabled Band Steering and it immediately dropped my Guest network and everything connected to it (Nest Doorbell and other IoT devices). Turning the feature didn't seem to fix it, so I restarted the eeros and I was back in business. But the feature is turned off.

      • mat
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Mike K I had the same experience with Band Steering, and like you it took a reboot (with the labs feature off) to resolve it. My eeros are in bridge mode.

      • Mike_K
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      mat OK. FWIW, my eeros are NOT in bridge mode. I have eero Plus features enabled.

      • lincke
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Mike K I had same experience where Dlink camera on guest network does not connect with beam steering enabled. 

      Still I’m loving the beta feature access Eero team. I’d love to see the ability to vpn back to my Eero from public WiFi if that is feasible. 

    • avanpelt
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I enabled band steering yesterday on my first-gen, three-pack system but had to turn it off after an hour. Enabling band steering seemed to force all my Nest cameras to connect to the same eero in my house. That was fine for three of the cameras, which are relatively close to that eero. However, one of the cameras is on the other side of the house from that eero and the camera was trying to maintain a 5 GHz connection to the eero that is furthest away from it (a double whammy). For the next hour, I watched as the camera would be online for a few minutes and then offline for 10 to 15 minutes. There was seemingly nothing I could do to make that camera to connect to the eero that is within 15 feet of it. I turned band steering off and the camera immediately connected to the eero that is 15 feet away from it.

      • Fan of tinkering with new hardware. Canadian dude.
      • cotedan87
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      avanpelt I have 10 Nest cams. 6 are indoors and run at 5 GHz and never disconnect. The outdoor cams though are regulated to run at 2.4 GHz in Canada. I get the occasional disconnect from each of the outdoor cams even though none is more than 10-15 feet from an indoor Eero. 

      I have band steering (and all the other eero Plus betas and features) running and the outdoor cams do disconnect randomly and occasionally, generally for a couple mins. 

      • joedaman88
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      avanpelt I saw this same behavior as well and left it on.  After about 1/2 a day, devices starting to connect to the strongest signal, i.e. the closest eero.  Just a FYI.

    • foo
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Found a potential issue with the Smart Queue feature.

    I'm assuming that the feature itself uses the detected bandwidth to manage and regulate client bandwidth consumption which is pretty normal for any QOS/QOS-like features. The problem is the mechanism for the running the bandwidth speed test is seemingly constrained by the system itself.

    I just updated my connection speeds to double what I had and the internal speed tests were not reflecting the change. When doing speed tests on both wired and wireless clients, the speeds mirrored what was showing in the app and was limited to the last detected slower speed before the upgrade. It wasn't until I disabled the Smart Queue feature and let the internal speed test run was it then able to detect the faster speeds and allow all of my clients to show bandwidth updates.

    This was especially an issue since the installer asked me to do a speed test and was showing no change in internet speeds and I mentioned to him that there's no way it could be the Eero and then proceeded to prove myself wrong.

     

    My recommendation:

    - Allow a Smart Queue whitelist to allow any client or destination to bypass the queue. This will essentially enable a prioritization feature which would be more in line with traditional QOS and probably greatly appreciated by everyone including myself.

    - Add the internal speed test mechanism to this whitelist.

    - Add any bandwidth speed testing domains to the whitelist. This is probably insanely difficult to do so you're probably better off adding a disclaimer to the feature that mentions that any speed tests done on client computers may be affected by Smart Queue.

     

    Hope that helps!

    FOO

      • DocTaH
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      foo I had this exact problem. What made it worse for me is since the Eero automatically runs a speed test every night, if there was a test that resulted in a slow speed, the Eero would hold that slow speed until another speed test was run. 

      It was driving me crazy as I, like you, did not initially think it was the Eero

    • Fan of tinkering with new hardware. Canadian dude.
    • cotedan87
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    eero Plus is slightly ahead in testing ... 

    Have been experimenting with eero Activity Centre / Labs activated vs disabled. 

    There is a small but measurable positive difference having eero Band Steering, DNS caching, and SQM enabled VS. having eero in Bridge Mode through a Bitdefender Box2 with SQM and DNS caching disabled. There are Nest cam disconnects on both, but the eero features are a bit smoother than the Bitdefender ones. 

    Things are generally stable under both systems, but eero Plus and labs seems to be slightly ahead, at least in my testing. Mac HomeKit also is slightly more stable with LIFX bulbs having less disconnects. 

    Devices: 10 Nest cams (5 outdoor running at 2.4), 19 LIFX bulbs, variety of Apple HomePods / Google Homes etc. 60+ devices being pushed against eero at any given time. 

    • joedaman88
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I don't think local dns caching is working for me...unless I am failing to understand how it works.  My assumption is that the eero would point dns to my gateway eero which in my case is 192.168.1.1.  However, with it switched on, all my clients are still pointed to 1.1.1.1 cloudflare dns.  Is anybody else seeing this behavior?

      • Fan of tinkering with new hardware. Canadian dude.
      • cotedan87
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      joedaman88 If you have eero Plus engaged, some devices will still show your preferred dns. My Apple TV shows 1.1.1.1 too but it’s just because my modem has been pointed there. Everything is still sent through ZScaler no matter what. Perhaps they should add a screen explanation though. This seems to be a common question. 

      • joedaman88
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      cotedan87 I appreciate the input. I am not currently an eero Plus subscriber. 

      • Fan of tinkering with new hardware. Canadian dude.
      • cotedan87
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      joedaman88 I suppose LOCAL DNS is for "local" use in the Eero home system from what I understand and shouldn't affect what happens on the outside. Just another user here, but two heads are sometimes better than one to figure things out. :) 

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