When we first moved into our house in Ottawa, we had just the wifi that came with our Hitron cable modem. While it had been sufficient for our needs in a two bedroom condo, it become quickly apparent that in a house it wasn’t going to cut it. Big chunks of the house were total dead zones.
I constantly want to be up to date with networking, despite having pretty weak networking skills. For this round, I did some research, and figured I’d make a safe choice and go with the TP-Link Archer C7, which at the time was the Wirecutter’s recommended choice.
The Archer mostly served us fine, until we bought an Arlo baby camera. I should really write a review of our Arlo some day, but that’s another post. It’s a Wifi baby camera. We would use it pretty much every time my daughter was asleep, which meant we were streaming video across the network for effectively 16 hours a day. This didn't really get along well with the Archer.
The symptom we started to encounter was that the 2.4GHz wifi band the Arlo was connected to would start to slow down until finally it effectively stopped answering any requests. The problem would persist until we rebooted the router. I'm honestly not sure if the problem started right away, as we were still pretty sleep deprived in the grand scheme of things when we got the Arlo, but it definitely got worse over time. It would also vary: Some weeks we'd have almost no troubles, and other weeks we'd have to reboot the router every couple of days. Then over time, the bad weeks got worse, and we'd have to reboot the router every day some weeks. I mastered the art of rebooting the router from my phone, using the 5Ghz Wifi band that hadn't died.
Eventually my wife had enough, and she demanded that we fix this. I went hunting for a solution. For a while I'd dreamed of building a Ubiquiti network. I'd read enough blog posts and reviews to think I wanted that crazy level of control that came with a Ubiquiti network.
I tried to sell my wife on this idea, but as soon as I mentioned the wiring I wanted to run, she said no: too much complexity. (At the time, I also hadn't yet heard about the Dream Machine, which would have heavily reduced the complexity. However, reviews for it are scarce even today). Instead, we ended up with perhaps the exact opposite of a Ubiquiti install: an eero 3 pack.
A poorly lit glamour shot of a single eero
eero is what you would imagine a router would be like if Apple circa 2017 built a router. It's slick, effective and kind of opaque as to what's going on.
Opening the box and the packaging puts the product front and centre, reminding me of unboxing an iPhone. Underneath the three eero are three USB-C power adapters (which I infer from the manual are 'special' to the eero: its LED lights up a different colour to complain if you use a non-matching adapter). Also included is a short ethernet cable. The build quality is excellent: The cables and power adapters feel great, with a very premium feeling coating, and the routers themselves have a nice glossy finish with soft rubber bottom. Really nice hardware.
Setup is almost trivial: took about ten minutes and I had all three units running in the house, all guided by their app.
The app
The app is actually the only way to control the routers, and that's my first fear with these routers. There is no "sign in at 192.168.1.1 with admin/admin" dashboard. Which means in the off chance that eero stops supporting the app, I suddenly can't control my network. While I don't feel like this is a likely outcome, it nevertheless is a fear I have.
The app is very simple, intentionally: This is not designed for people who want to have packet level introspection of their networks. There's no live updating traffic graphs, no cool layout diagrams. Just a simple interface with a big green bar to ensure you know that the network is all working just fine.
You can add IP reservations (which I need so that my work desktop has a consistent IP so that I can ssh into it without dorking around with zeroconf.
Surprisingly you can't add another admin account to the network. The only way my wife can admin the network is if she logs in under my account on her phone, which isn't particularly nice (albeit, and this is eero's watchword, simple).
The app also pushes eero secure, though not so hard I am annoyed yet. Eero secure adds some ad-blocking, 'threat scanning' and content filters. Nothing I need just yet.
Performance
Initial performance testing with the eeros was really impressive. I've run enough speed tests with the Archer that I had a pretty good idea of what the wifi was like in a couple of parts in the house. i.e. in my office, speed tests would typically get me between 25 and 45 Mbps. After installing the new eero routers I got 125 mbs.
A problem
Ok; So all good? Not quite. We did end up going on an adventure with one of my eero. Here's the email I sent to eero support:
I have one (of three) eero which appears to disconnect from the mesh network very frequently. Currently, in order to maintain stability on the rest of the network I have it disconnected. This is a brand new install direct from the box: The problems started within a day of the first install (it’s possible they started even earlier and I only noticed on the second day).
The troublesome eero was originally installed in my office. The gateway eero is installed in the living room, and I had a third eero installed in the basement.
Here are the trouble shooting steps I have taken so far:
- Removed and Re-added the office eero from the network. This did not resolve the problem, the office eero dropped off the mesh within a couple of hours.
- I moved the office eero to another location (bedroom downstairs). Similarly, within a couple of hours it had dropped again.
- To verify the original location was not the issue, I moved my family room eero, which so far had a stable connection, into my office, and unplugged the original office eero. I have been running in this configuration for more than 48 hours with no disconnects.
My suspicion is that there’s something amiss with the single office eero.
I’d appreciate any guidance. My current plan is to return the set of eero and replace all three, but I’d prefer not to if it can be arranged.
It was particularly peculiar working when the office eero dropped. The way I work these days I mostly remote connect from my laptop to my desktop over wifi, because the desktop is so much more powerful a machine it makes me more productive in my work. When the eero would drop out of the mesh, I would still be able to work and connect to my desktop, but just not the internet, as my office formed a little network partition.
Once I disconnected the problematic unit all the issues went away, it was just a little irksome that we'd paid for three units, and only had two that worked. Despite that, network performance remained excellent with only the two eero connected.
eero replied to my email that they would like to replace the bad unit. In under a week I had a new eero, along with a return label for the defective one. We've been running the mesh with all three units for a few days now, and it seems like we're out of the woods. No issues since.
Amazon
Another concern I have with eero is their acquisition by Amazon. As near as I can tell, the integration so far is minimal (an Alexa skill to allow you to turn off your kids internet), but I'm definitely going to be keeping a close eye on the eero privacy policy. Yet another opportunity for an internet giant to hoover up data.
Conclusion
I'm happy with the eero system so far. It's not got knobs galore, but I think I really like that. With great power comes great responsibility, and with something like a wifi network I don't feel like I want responsibility, I just want something that works reliably day in and day out. I want my router to be invisible infrastructure, and so far, so good.