Retiring the Eero WiFi Blanket

It was 2017 and almost every podcast host appeared to sing the Eero mesh wifi song. Admittedly, I got sucked into the hype. The marketing around the Eero mesh system was super cool - “Blanket your home with Eero”. It is easy to forget how terrible my home Wi-Fi was at the time. As head of the tech department in my home, I had constant complaints which to a very large extent was almost entirely solved by the Eero wifi system.

Unfortunately, in 2017, Eero was not sold in my country and I took the plunge to import it from USA. I put my faith in an eBay seller who actually came through at a somewhat reasonable price. This was the second generation of the Eero product.

Eero wasn't only the best, it was the only mesh Wi-Fi system made for home use at the time. These days, every networking company is making a decent mesh system. Eero no longer is the market leader. None of this bothered me. Competition is good for consumers. However, in 2019, my heart sunk when Eero was acquired by Amazon. Secretly, I was hoping Apple would buy Eero. This would have been icing on the cake. Ideally, I would have preferred Eero to be an independent company rather than the one of the hundreds of businesses Amazon owns and controls. Still, at the time, I believed in the positive future painted by the Eero CEO. I was hopeful Amazon would throw money at Eero but let them operate independently.

Over the years, Amazon has integrated Eero into their smart system, which in hindsight makes complete sense from a business perspective. However, as a customer perspective, I do not believe the experience has improved. Perhaps, I have outgrown the simple effective Wi-Fi experience that Eero offers, which fundamentally it still does. To be honest, in 2017, I had less than 25 Wi-Fi devices in my home. Today, I have 60.

My Eero system was almost 6 years old this year and for the last two years, it had been sluggish. I called Eero countless times asking why there are random disconnects etc. Considering Eero is completely cloud based; I hoped that they can provide me with a response. However, despite their attempts, they said my Eero system was working beautifully. In most cases it was, but the random disconnects were annoying, especially when I was on a work video call. Also, being cloud based, where are the benefits to the customer??? To this day, the Eero app will not tell you if your home Internet is disconnected or experiencing an outage. My new system does, it instantly notifies me. This is especially useful because I can tell other family members instead of them trying to troubleshoot on their device assuming their device is having issues, etc.

The other issue I had was Eero wanted me to sign up to a subscription so I can see my download stats. At one point, I was happy to do that and took up the trial. Sadly, if one purchases an Eero subscription and wants to use their features, one cannot change the DNS. My Eero system use Cloudflare’s DNS and I had no intention of changing. I also did not appreciate that I am paying Eero money only to be limited to the options that were previously available for free.

It also bugged me that any troubleshooting is limited to the Eero app which to this day is not available on Macs or PC. Eero could have made available its iPad app for Apple silicon Macs but to this day it has reframed from doing that. My new system not only has a web UI, it also has made its iPad app available on the Mac. Now, isnt that cool :)

If I am being honest, Eero is no longer a good fit for my home. My needs have changed. Eero served me really well for the last 6 years, but it’s time to move on.

In May 2023, I disconnected all the Eero devices and upgraded to a new networking system. So far, it’s working beautifully. I am once again thrilled with my home network.

This is one example where, as consumers, we should vote with our money instead of accepting what is provided to us. These companies should work towards what we want, not what they believe is best for their bottom line.