Amazon’s inexpensive Eero mesh Wi-Fi kit is shockingly good

This Eero kit consists of three Eero routers, rather than the less-expensive one-router-and-two-Beacon kits.

Jim Salter

This Eero kit consists of three Eero routers, rather than the less-expensive one-router-and-two-Beacon kits. Jim Salter

Eero is neither particularly lovely nor unlovely in our opinion. But its all-white all-glossy finish is decidedly difficult to photograph.

Jim Salter

Eero is neither particularly lovely nor unlovely in our opinion. But its all-white all-glossy finish is decidedly difficult to photograph. Jim Salter

This is the back of Eero. The two Ethernet jacks auto-sense whether they’re connected to WAN or LAN; you don’t need to worry about which you plug into what. The charging jack is USB-C.

Jim Salter

This is the back of Eero. The two Ethernet jacks auto-sense whether they’re connected to WAN or LAN; you don’t need to worry about which you plug into what. The charging jack is USB-C. Jim Salter

Eero is neither particularly lovely nor unlovely in our opinion. But its all-white all-glossy finish is decidedly difficult to photograph. Jim Salter

This is the back of Eero. The two Ethernet jacks auto-sense whether they’re connected to WAN or LAN; you don’t need to worry about which you plug into what. The charging jack is USB-C. Jim Salter

Eero’s white LED is a little bit bright for our tastes—it’s OK during the day but can be obnoxious at night. It can be disabled entirely in the Eero app.

Jim Salter

As always, we strongly recommend you physically label Wi-Fi mesh gear with the location where it should go.

Jim Salter

We finally got our hands on Amazon’s redesigned second-gen Eero kit, and we won’t bury the lede—it’s a fantastic performer, especially for the price. Although its performance isn’t on par with the Plume Superpods, it was easy to set up and didn’t outright fail any of our torture tests. Eero maintained decent browsing latency all around the house, even while simultaneously delivering four emulated 4K video streams.

Don’t get us wrong, there’s still a lot of daylight between Eero and Plume—but with the Eero kit retailing for $250 normally, and currently on special for $189 with a free Echo Dot and without need for a subscription (for most features), it’s a heck of a deal.

On the other hand, if you want Eero because of its Alexa integration… maybe you ought to wait a bit.

Setup is short and sweet

When you begin setting up Eero, the first step is telling it about your home. Or at least, it’s supposed to be—these “Shape” and “Floors” buttons did nothing when we tried them. “Next” it is, then!

Jim Salter

When you begin setting up Eero, the first step is telling it about your home. Or at least, it’s supposed to be—these “Shape” and “Floors” buttons did nothing when we tried them. “Next” it is, then! Jim Salter

Eero suggests placement of units in its fake floor plan. This is unlikely to be helpful, since the “Edit home layout” button doesn’t seem to work at the moment.

Jim Salter

Eero suggests placement of units in its fake floor plan. This is unlikely to be helpful, since the “Edit home layout” button doesn’t seem to work at the moment. Jim Salter

When you begin setting up Eero, the first step is telling it about your home. Or at least, it’s supposed to be—these “Shape” and “Floors” buttons did nothing when we tried them. “Next” it is, then! Jim Salter

Eero suggests placement of units in its fake floor plan. This is unlikely to be helpful, since the “Edit home layout” button doesn’t seem to work at the moment. Jim Salter

After placing each additional Eero unit past the router, the system will test for connectivity.

Jim Salter

After placing each additional Eero unit past the router, the system will test for connectivity. Jim Salter

Assuming you didn’t place your Eero out of reach, the test finishes and flatters you about your champion placement, and it’s onto the next. When you run out of Eeros to place, you’re done!

Jim Salter

Assuming you didn’t place your Eero out of reach, the test finishes and flatters you about your champion placement, and it’s onto the next. When you run out of Eeros to place, you’re done! Jim Salter

After placing each additional Eero unit past the router, the system will test for connectivity. Jim Salter

Assuming you didn’t place your Eero out of reach, the test finishes and flatters you about your champion placement, and it’s onto the next. When you run out of Eeros to place, you’re done! Jim Salter

The setup process for Eero was gratifyingly quick, especially in comparison to the exhausting procedure Nest Wi-Fi put us through last month. But although it was quick and easy, some of the fancier bits seemed to be broken. In particular, the Eero app wants to offer you placement advice for your units based on a fake floorplan. There are buttons which offer to let you alter that floorplan to match your own—but at least in our testing, it didn’t work. We tapped “Shape,” “Floors,” and, on the next screen, “Edit home layout” until our fingers were raw, but nothing happened.

Luckily, we know this home—and which layouts do and don’t work in it—extremely well by now, so we just shrugged, placed our Eeros, and called it a day. The whole thing was over and done with in well under 10 minutes—under five, if you don’t count the time spent waiting for Eero units to cold boot when first plugged in.

As always, we strongly recommend you physically label Wi-Fi mesh gear with the location where it should go.

Credit: Jim Salter

As always, we’d like to remind everyone that you should label your mesh kit units physically as you set them up, as well as virtually inside the Eero app. You’ll eventually be glad that you did.

Performance

As usual, we’re testing in a 3,500-square-foot home with two floors and some significant challenges. The Internet connection is in a closet in the entry hallway, so router placement isn’t ideal. And the downstairs floor is a partial basement built into a hillside, so there are 30 feet or so of packed earth and a concrete slab blocking line of sight to the router closet.

The top floor of our test house is relatively straightforward—although like many houses, it suffers from terrible router placement nowhere near its center.

Jim Salter

The top floor of our test house is relatively straightforward—although like many houses, it suffers from terrible router placement nowhere near its center. Jim Salter

The bottom floor of our test house is far more of a challenge—there are a good 30 feet or so of packed earth and concrete slab in the line of sight between this floor and the router.

Jim Salter

The bottom floor of our test house is far more of a challenge—there are a good 30 feet or so of packed earth and concrete slab in the line of sight between this floor and the router. Jim Salter

The top floor of our test house is relatively straightforward—although like many houses, it suffers from terrible router placement nowhere near its center. Jim Salter

The bottom floor of our test house is far more of a challenge—there are a good 30 feet or so of packed earth and concrete slab in the line of sight between this floor and the router. Jim Salter

Our first placement choice for three-piece Wi-Fi mesh kits is to put the first satellite AP on top of the TV island in the living room and the second on a shelf in the downstairs den directly beneath it. The downstairs AP connects to the living-room AP, which in turn connects to the router.

When supported well by a mesh Wi-Fi kit, this offers much lower latency than our alternate “star” topology, which puts one satellite in the upstairs bedroom above the downstairs office and the other satellite in the kitchen, above the downstairs bedroom. Eero performed extremely well in our preferred tree topology, so we did not test under the alternate layout.

In our simplest test, we just gobble a bunch of data from one laptop at a time. This makes big numbers but doesn’t tell you much about how well a system will perform.

Jim Salter

In our simplest test, we just gobble a bunch of data from one laptop at a time. This makes big numbers but doesn’t tell you much about how well a system will perform. Jim Salter

The “all stations” test is more interesting: we try to download as much data as possible at each station, simultaneously.

Jim Salter

The “all stations” test is more interesting: we try to download as much data as possible at each station, simultaneously. Jim Salter

In our simplest test, we just gobble a bunch of data from one laptop at a time. This makes big numbers but doesn’t tell you much about how well a system will perform. Jim Salter

The “all stations” test is more interesting: we try to download as much data as possible at each station, simultaneously. Jim Salter

In our first and simplest test, we give each laptop a chance to have the network all to itself and download 1MB chunks of data as fast as it can. This test makes big numbers, but it’s honestly not very helpful—as you can see, there’s very little to differentiate the kits here. Plume’s Superpods pulled down more data in total than either Nest Wi-Fi or Eero, but not by enough to matter.

Things get more interesting when we turn all four laptops up to 11 at the same time. Here, we can see Plume still dominates in both big numbers and in consistency—each laptop gets very close to the same amount of data. Nest and Eero both struggle in one location; Nest—which was only a two-piece kit—has real difficulty servicing the downstairs bedroom, while Eero, surprisingly, struggles to serve the laptop in the kitchen.

Although the kitchen in general has a clear line of sight from the living room, there’s a large metal range hood directly between the test laptop in the kitchen and the AP in the living room. It looks like the Eero kit is having an unusually difficult time with RF multipathing due to the range hood; this problem disappears if you move the test laptop—but that’s cheating; the obstacle in what would otherwise be an “easy” room is a deliberate part of the test.

This is where the rubber begins to hit the road. Plume and Eero offer good Web-browsing latency while streaming 1080p to all four STAs. Nest… not so much.

Jim Salter

This is where the rubber begins to hit the road. Plume and Eero offer good Web-browsing latency while streaming 1080p to all four STAs. Nest… not so much. Jim Salter

Delivering four 1080p video streams simultaneously is an easy job for Eero and any good mesh kit.

Jim Salter

Delivering four 1080p video streams simultaneously is an easy job for Eero and any good mesh kit. Jim Salter

This is where the rubber begins to hit the road. Plume and Eero offer good Web-browsing latency while streaming 1080p to all four STAs. Nest… not so much. Jim Salter

Delivering four 1080p video streams simultaneously is an easy job for Eero and any good mesh kit. Jim Salter

In the 1080p torture test, each station requests a simulated 1080p video stream. This amounts to 1MB chunks of data, fetched frequently enough to amount to 5Mbps of data. This should not be a challenge to any half-decent mesh Wi-Fi kit. This isn’t the real “torture,” though—serving bursty 5Mbps streams to four locations is easy, but maintaining low latency in simulated Web browsing sessions is noticeably tougher.

Eero breezes through the 1080p torture test’s browsing latency exam just fine. Although its 443ms average is slower than Plume’s 237ms, this is still a perfectly respectable figure—particularly in comparison to Nest Wi-Fi. We cropped the X axis at 1500ms, but one of Nest’s results was well over twice that slow!

Trying to browse webpages while four different 4K streams are going is serious torture—for the most part, Eero does a good job of it.

Jim Salter

Trying to browse webpages while four different 4K streams are going is serious torture—for the most part, Eero does a good job of it. Jim Salter

Delivering 4K video streams to four different places in a big house is a challenge all on its own—but Eero does a solid job of it.

Jim Salter

Delivering 4K video streams to four different places in a big house is a challenge all on its own—but Eero does a solid job of it. Jim Salter

Trying to browse webpages while four different 4K streams are going is serious torture—for the most part, Eero does a good job of it. Jim Salter

Delivering 4K video streams to four different places in a big house is a challenge all on its own—but Eero does a solid job of it. Jim Salter

The 4K video torture test works just like the 1080p torture test did—we stream simulated video to all laptops, and we also run a simulated Web-browsing workload at the same time. It’s pretty difficult just to deliver four separate 20Mbps streams at once, but the gold standard is still the browsing latency test. Very few kits can both provide all that streaming data and a good Web experience at the same time.

Eero didn’t do perfectly in the 4K torture test, but it did well—incredibly well, for a budget kit. It averaged a perfectly serviceable 701ms latency while all four 4K streams were running. Once again, the kitchen was Eero’s toughest shot—we don’t love its 1,398ms time there, but it certainly beats Nest’s worst latency of 3,634ms in the downstairs bedroom.

Eero isn’t going to take the unlimited-league performance crown away from Plume’s Superpods anytime soon, but it performs very well indeed.

Managing Eero in its app

This is the homescreen of the Eero app. You can get a general idea of what’s going on with your Eeros and your Wi-Fi devices here. We especially like the “top devices by usage” notifier. Nice.

Jim Salter

This is the homescreen of the Eero app. You can get a general idea of what’s going on with your Eeros and your Wi-Fi devices here. We especially like the “top devices by usage” notifier. Nice. Jim Salter

Tapping any individual Eero unit from the homescreen brings you to a detail screen that will show you information about both that Eero unit and which of your devices are connected to it.

Jim Salter

Tapping any individual Eero unit from the homescreen brings you to a detail screen that will show you information about both that Eero unit and which of your devices are connected to it. Jim Salter

You see a list of the devices on your network in the app, with indications of how busy they are. Tapping an individual device drills down to more information, and the ability to nickname any that don’t already have “friendly” names.

Jim Salter

You see a list of the devices on your network in the app, with indications of how busy they are. Tapping an individual device drills down to more information, and the ability to nickname any that don’t already have “friendly” names. Jim Salter

Tapping any individual Eero unit from the homescreen brings you to a detail screen that will show you information about both that Eero unit and which of your devices are connected to it. Jim Salter

You see a list of the devices on your network in the app, with indications of how busy they are. Tapping an individual device drills down to more information, and the ability to nickname any that don’t already have “friendly” names. Jim Salter

Eero, sadly, does not support a Web interface. It’s the Eero mobile app or nothing. With that said, the app is pretty good, and within the limits of a smartphone screen and touch interface, it’s very easy and intuitive to navigate. The home screen gives you a good overview of your network, and you can tap any element to drill down for more detailed information on that element—such as tapping one Eero to find out what’s connected to it, or tapping a device from the “top devices” to get more information about it.

More advanced setup and maintenance stuff can be found in the “hamburger menu” on the top left of the homescreen.

This is Eero’s “hamburger” menu. Of particular note are the “switch network” button—which allows you to easily manage more than one home, for example your parents’ and your own—and “Family Profiles.”

Jim Salter

This is Eero’s “hamburger” menu. Of particular note are the “switch network” button—which allows you to easily manage more than one home, for example your parents’ and your own—and “Family Profiles.” Jim Salter

We set up three profiles and split all of our devices amongst them. The “Admin” profile contains the smartphone being used to manage Eero, and an Echo Dot we also wanted to manage Eero with. That turned out to be a mistake.

Jim Salter

We set up three profiles and split all of our devices amongst them. The “Admin” profile contains the smartphone being used to manage Eero, and an Echo Dot we also wanted to manage Eero with. That turned out to be a mistake. Jim Salter

This is what you see when you tap into an individual profile. The “Safe Filters” won’t actually do anything unless you pony up for Eero Secure, at $30/year—but you can pause the Internet on a profile, either manually or by schedule.

Jim Salter

This is what you see when you tap into an individual profile. The “Safe Filters” won’t actually do anything unless you pony up for Eero Secure, at $30/year—but you can pause the Internet on a profile, either manually or by schedule. Jim Salter

We set up three profiles and split all of our devices amongst them. The “Admin” profile contains the smartphone being used to manage Eero, and an Echo Dot we also wanted to manage Eero with. That turned out to be a mistake. Jim Salter

This is what you see when you tap into an individual profile. The “Safe Filters” won’t actually do anything unless you pony up for Eero Secure, at $30/year—but you can pause the Internet on a profile, either manually or by schedule. Jim Salter

Creating scheduled pause times is simple and intuitive. Start time, end time, days of week. Easy.

Jim Salter

You can create multiple, individual schedules for a single profile. So if you wanted different pause times for bedtime, dinnertime, and “just messing with their heads” time, no problem!

Jim Salter

You can create multiple family profiles in the Eero app, each of which contain one or more devices. Entire profiles can be “paused”—meaning, no Internet for you!—either manually and arbitrarily or by predetermined schedule. It’s probably best to keep this simple—if you don’t ever intend to pause access for a device, we don’t recommend profiling that device. We created an “Admin” profile specifically for devices that should never have access interrupted—like the smartphone the Eero app was installed on, and an Echo dot we wanted to voice-control Eero with—and that later turned out to be a mistake.

Be an IT pro! View the same report that professionals use! citation needed

Jim Salter

Be an IT pro! View the same report that professionals use! citation needed Jim Salter

If you want to filter the kids’ network access, or “view the same report that professionals use”—whatever that is—it’ll cost you a fairly reasonable $30/year.

Jim Salter

If you want to filter the kids’ network access, or “view the same report that professionals use”—whatever that is—it’ll cost you a fairly reasonable $30/year. Jim Salter

Leaving SafeSearch—which is done entirely by Google, not by Eero—grayed out feels like a cheap cash grab.

Jim Salter

Leaving SafeSearch—which is done entirely by Google, not by Eero—grayed out feels like a cheap cash grab. Jim Salter

If you want to filter the kids’ network access, or “view the same report that professionals use”—whatever that is—it’ll cost you a fairly reasonable $30/year. Jim Salter

Leaving SafeSearch—which is done entirely by Google, not by Eero—grayed out feels like a cheap cash grab. Jim Salter

Eero offers family filtering on individual profiles, as well. This allows you to filter your teenage kid’s phone and tablet through one profile and your middle-school kid’s tablet and Chromebook through another, with separate levels of filtering for each. This part doesn’t come for free, though. If you want the family filtering, you’ll need to pony up $30/year.

We did not specifically test the family filtering this time around, but you should know it will necessarily have some severe limitations—since the filtering happens at the router level, not the device level, it doesn’t know what happens inside an HTTPS stream. This means that https://reddit.com/r/kittens and https://reddit.com/r/unspeakablyvilethings will both be filtered—or not filtered—just the same. You’ll have similar problems with everything from Flickr to Imgur to Twitter and Facebook.

The option to force Google and YouTube into Safe mode is present but grayed out without a $30 Eero Secure subscription. Hiding this setting behind a paywall feels like a cheap, obnoxious cash grab—the actual work is being done by Google for free, but Eero is charging you to access it.

If you’re heavily invested in the Android/ChromeOS ecosystem, it may make more sense to use Google Family Link for your Internet-pausing-and-scrubbing needs instead. Family Link allows you to pause each entire Android or ChromeOS device, not just Internet access, and it includes both forced safe search and granular Web filtering, all at no cost. (This assumes you have six or fewer people in your family. Google does not allow a seventh family member to be included, period. Even if you’re willing to pay for it.)

Alexa “integration”

We couldn’t find any up-to-date documentation for tying Alexa to Eero, but we got there eventually. From the Alexa app, you need to go into devices, then pick Router.

Jim Salter

We couldn’t find any up-to-date documentation for tying Alexa to Eero, but we got there eventually. From the Alexa app, you need to go into devices, then pick Router. Jim Salter

We have no idea what happens if you choose “other.” We chose Eero.

Jim Salter

We have no idea what happens if you choose “other.” We chose Eero. Jim Salter

Notice what it doesn’t say? It doesn’t say “unpause Anaya’s Wi-Fi.” That’s because you can’t.

Jim Salter

Notice what it doesn’t say? It doesn’t say “unpause Anaya’s Wi-Fi.” That’s because you can’t. Jim Salter

We have no idea what happens if you choose “other.” We chose Eero. Jim Salter

Notice what it doesn’t say? It doesn’t say “unpause Anaya’s Wi-Fi.” That’s because you can’t. Jim Salter

You should have already done this bit. Just hit Continue.

Jim Salter

Don’t do it! Nothing but pain and heartbreak lie ahead.

Jim Salter

After passing an SMS authentication check, your Eero is linked to your Alexa, and you can now screw everything up by voice alone. Yay.

Jim Salter

Since Eero was originally its own product before the Amazon acquisition this year, we thought we’d better take a closer look at how well its Alexa integration went. This was a horrible decision for us and a good decision for you. Spoiler alert: it’s awful. If you link your Eero kit to Alexa, prepare yourself either for a world of pain… or for just ignoring it and using the mobile app anyway.

We’d already separated our devices into three Family Profiles in the Eero app: Admin, Adults, and Kids. The Admin profile contained the smartphone with the Eero app and an Echo Dot we wanted to use to control Eero with. Adults contained two of our test laptops, and Kids contained the other two. Our goal was simple: we just wanted to say “Alexa, pause the kids’ Wi-Fi” and have it work. Things did not go down that way.

Finally, we realized that when Alexa paused all Eero profiles, that meant both our smartphone with the Eero app and our Echo Dot—both of which were in the Admin profile we’d created—got paused, too. So Alexa had no Internet access, and without Internet access, she doesn’t respond at all. It would be great if there was a canned message along the lines of “I don’t have Internet access,” but there wasn’t. Just… silence.

Thankfully, the Eero app itself works even when the Wi-Fi is “paused” for the phone running it, so after resorting to the app to get everyone back online, we tried again. This time, instead of asking Alexa to pause the kids’ “Wi-Fi,” we asked her to pause the kids’ profile.

At this point, extremely loud radio station ads began blaring from the speaker. Eventually, the loud ads turned into equally loud country music.

I am not a country music fan.

We do not recommend Eero’s Alexa integration.

Conclusions

With the notable exception of voice commands through Alexa, everything about the new Eero was great. It’s easy to set up, it performs well, and its app is intuitive and easy to navigate. At well under $300 even without a sale, it’s easy to spend this much money on just a router—and unless you live in a very small apartment with near-optimal placement of the Internet connection, Eero’s Wi-Fi will run rings around any standalone router.