I have an unusual situation that I had to solve. I'm trying to add wifi to a house that is 9000 square feet. The house is not heated and cooled at 9k sq. feet, it's built around a 4500 square foot masonry area so the house is a big hollow square. All sides of the house have one interior/exterior wall that is masonry with rebar reinforcement. This mean signal is a bear to get across the house. I had an awesome IT guy on staff and I've had him out here installing, tweaking, testing, etc. wifi over the years. No matter what I did I had decent to terrible signal. We've pulled hard lines across the house to have multiple wired access points, we've switched to the same enterprise system we used at work, we've done it all. The end result is my signal was crappy. Plugged into the router, I get 18-23 Mbps (max provided by AT&T). As I get into living areas, it drops as low as 1-2 Mbps. It varies by day, and with that level of signal drop, it sometimes just dies all together. Just recently I finally ripped out the existing access points we had and installed new Apple airport extremes. The signal was pretty much unusable meaning the frustrating enterprise access points were actually doing the best job possible.
Since my IT guy doesn't work for me anymore, I can't have him come out and fix my issues any longer so I asked him if he had any ideas of what I could do. He shot me a link to Eero. Hmm, never heard of it. Amazon had it so with trust in Amazon's return policy I thought I'd give it a try. I pulled out the Airport and plugged in the Eero unit #1. (after installing the Eero app). In about 10 minutes I had it running (power issue on my end). Once it popped up live, I checked to see if it was working correctly and the internet popped. Very quick. I went into the room where I had 1-2 Mbps with the airport extreme and I had about 14 Mbps! This was a room where I couldn't pull cable so my thought was I could use the Eero to get some kind of decent signal. I had 64% of my total available speed before I even installed the second Eero. I quickly installed the second Eero in this room which basically meant plugging it in and selecting next a couple of times on the app. Once it came alive I rechecked. 23 Mbps! Absolutely full speed that was rock solid. Finally I went to the other side of the house to install another wired Eero to give signal over there. Another minute to get things installed and boom! 23 Mbps. They are installing fiber on our road and I frankly didn't care. My wifi was so bad I'd never be able to use fiber's speed. Now I'll be chasing the installers around asking them when I can get on the list! We still get some variance in speed as 23 Mbps is our rock solid top speed on our service but now that variance is with AT&T, not my wifi.
I use OpenDNS to block content on our internet. Eero has a simple screen to enter custom DNS. 30 seconds and I had it working. No double NAT, no extra access points. Nothing. Dead simple.
I used a wireless scanner to check the signal in the entire house. I've only covered two sides of the four sided square. According to the scanner, I've got plenty of signal in the whole house now. No problem. However I have more areas to cover besides the house.
Because I didn't finish covering my property (I have an outbuilding where we work that needs it's own internet) I'm here ordering another pack of 3 to finish blanketing our property with rock solid wifi. That's $1000 worth of wifi, which is stupid. But if you've tried to work with crap wifi for years, you'd gladly pay for something that actually works. Eero actually works. It's also already automatically upgraded it's own software and emailed me to let me know it's done rather than the funky firmware upgrades I had to do on my old access points. It may all blow up later and I'll regret this. I know some other companies are coming to market with a cheaper alternative. But at this point they aren't to market yet so I'm sticking with Eero. It's actually a pleasure to use the internet again and I'm seven years into dealing with bad internet. Hopefully never again.
Update 3-11-16
After having the units installed about four days, I came home to find them dead. Two of the units had a red light rather than the normal white and one had a white light. I really fumbled trying to get them back online as the app was having trouble connecting, the internet was barely able to be used, etc. Eventually I deleted the entire network from the app but the devices didn't reset but my app did so I couldn't log in again. I finally contacted support and about a day later received a response with some things to try and that that person was escalating my case to another person who also contacted me shortly thereafter. The helpful tip, which I'd requested in my initial request was how to do a factory reset on the devices. It's a paperclip and hold the button down (tiny hole in the back of the unit) for 15 seconds. Once I reset all the units, I did the quick and easy reinstall which took about 10 minutes this time. Everything came back up and has been rock solid since. No idea what caused the issue but support worked, the units reset, and I've ordered another pack of three units which set up beautifully in my out building. Now if my internet is slow, I got to the AT&T router and reset it and it comes back to full speed. Wireless is NOT my problem anymore. This has solved so many problems I was having I cannot begin to explain how wonderful it is.
| Standing screen display size | 9.7 Inches |
|---|---|
| Wireless Type | 802.11abg, 802.11a/b/g/n, 2.4 GHz Radio Frequency |
