eero, I Love You
Home networking is objectively boring. Either your home network works for you in which case there’s no upgrades to be made, or it is a constant pain in your a. My home network has always been the latter. I live in a house built before the proliferation of the internet leaving me with only one access point tucked away in the corner of my house. The fastest plan my internet service provider (ISP) offers is 50 megabits per second, but it’s still a far cry from fast internet. Needless to say, work from home culture has felt like living in the stone ages. Then, just like the cavemen, I discovered fire, well actually I bought eero — they love using a lowercase ‘e’.
eero — the mesh network company acquired by Amazon — hit the market in 2016 to stellar reviews because of its simplicity.
Their product line has expanded in the years since its founding with the latest eero, eero Pro, and eero Beacon. These products are offered in a number of different combinations to allow for modular solutions depending on your home’s needs. Personally, I picked up an eero Pro and an eero Beacon. The eero Pro is their most powerful tri-band router and the Beacon is their range extender that plugs right into a wall outlet. I went with this configuration because, like I mentioned previously, my house is not wired with ethernet so I couldn’t place multiple of the latest wired eero nodes throughout my home. Wifi is the air of the digital world, and eero has done the best job of filling every nook and cranny with wifi out of any system I’ve used. It is super simple, super fast, and super reliable.
Part of the magic of eero is the setup. It just works. You download the app, and it walks you through the setup process in less than 10 minutes. It’s not just marketing mumbo jumbo, it’s really that easy. The in-app instructions to get your network setup are super easy to follow if you’re a technological luddite or a guru. And once your network is all set-up it’s easy to manage everything happening on it. eero offers two different services to help monitor and secure your network: eero Secure and eero Secure+. The basic tier, Secure for $29.99 per year, offers basic security features like filtering, ad blocking, activity monitoring, along with some other advanced security features; and Secure+ gives you access to a couple of digital privacy services 1Password, encrypt.me, and Malwarebytes for $99.99 per year. The best part about all of these features is that they just work without even having to think about it.
Before eero I was using a Netgear Nighthawk R6700 which was just an utter disappointment. The range was laughable which resulted in molasses slow kilobits per second download speeds in most rooms in my house. Now, I’m getting almost 40 megabits per second down in the same room streaming Lance — which you should absolutely watch. eero’s mesh networking gets rid of those pesky dead spots or slow downs and, again, makes your network just work.
eero’s magic is its reliability. There are lots of simple routers that stick to the friendly white tabletop look. There are lots of fast routers that tend to look like they’re alien spaceships sent to earth to end humanity. But eero is both fast and friendly — and that’s what makes them the best. eero has TrueMesh — which is their marketing term for their system that intelligently hops your signal between mesh nodes as you walk through your house. TrueMesh also allows for dynamic rerouting incase there’s a disruption in any part of your network — basically if a Beacon gets unplugged the network balances traffic so you don’t notice an outage. TrueMesh makes eero the most reliable network for your home. Again, it all just works.
I never thought I would love networking equipment, but after hating my setup for so, so long eero is a breath of fresh spring air. And there’s more than enough air to fill my house, finally.
