First Thoughts Eero

I recently got my hands on a three pack of eero's wifi system. I've been hearing great things about them since their release, but always questioned their price tag of five hundred dollars. 

For those that have not heard of eero, they are basically taking an enterprise level technology and introducing into homes, called Mesh networking. 

A traditional network links from one device out to all like a star and uses that single route to move data. Where as a mesh network connects all devices in an area to each other and uses multiple routes at the same time to increase reliability and speeds.

Keep an eye open for a full review in the coming weeks. 

eero does have that Apple-like quality. Is a bit pricey, however, it's solid build right down to the wires made me feel a bit better during the unboxing. I did find some room for improvement starting with the fact all setup and management have to be done through either an Android or iOS app. There is no web portal or desktop app. 

Setting up the eero's as bridged devices went smoothly. By Using the eero in bridge mode you pretty much lose all of its cool features, such as family profiles. However, you still benefit from the 802.11ab mesh network. 

Wanting to experience all of what eero had to offer, I figured I would just swap them out with my Apple airport extremes. 

This may get a bit technical and not needed by most but here we go. Within my home office network, I have a DHCP range for my main router/firewall. What I've done in the past is put my airports outside that range with a static IP. The main router continues to assign all the IP's including the wireless one. I do have a few other airports used as extenders with static IP's plugged into ethernet as well. 

So with that said, I tried setting up eero in the same fashion. However, each eero just seemed to keep cycling on and off. I decided to call support a day after Christmas and I must say they were very knowledgeable and answered in a timely manner. The short version is, yes you can set your main eero up with a static IP. However, the other eero routers remain set to DHCP. This totally seems backward to how I would think it would work. Pretty much the only way around this is to have all your eero's on their own topology. 

One way would be putting them on a switch of their own. We may be going further down a rabbit hole with technical mambo jumbo. I wanted the features of my personal router like bandwidth control, web filters, phish blocking, VPN's and the features on eero like family profiles. I wanted the best of both worlds. 

So seeing as I have Smart switches around my home office. I just went ahead and created a new VLAN for the eero routers. This would segregate them as if they were on their own switch. I was then well on my way to baking the cake and eating it too. 

My experience so far has been positive, with speed tests over wifi hitting 160mb's and what seems like no dead spots in my 3200sqft home. I'm a happy camper, even though I feel the price is sill a bit steep. It may be possible eero may mature a bit and grow into its price tag. As is, it's a bit steep for the average user.

My thoughts are if it's not broken don't fix it. It may be worth picking up if you find it on sale or have a heavy traffic network or the need of transferring large files fast. On the other hand, there are other consumer mesh networks popping up one after another, even though eero lead the charge.