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Amazon Is Buying Mesh Router Company Eero (theverge.com)
Amazon has announced that it's acquiring Eero, the maker of mesh home routers. "Amazon says buying Eero will allow the company to 'help customers better connect smart home devices,'" reports The Verge. "It will certainly make Alexa-compatible gadgets easier to set up if Amazon also controls the router technology. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed." From the report: Eero kicked off a wave of "smart" mesh router setups designed to overcome the coverage issues and dead zones of traditional routers. Instead of a single router device, multiple access points are used to blanket an entire home or apartment with a strong Wi-Fi signal. The system works as advertised, and it's all controlled with an intuitive smartphone app. Google, Samsung, Linksys, Netgear, and other electronics companies have since followed Eero's lead and released their own mesh bundles.
It sounds as though the Eero brand will live on after the acquisition -- at least in the near term. "By joining the Amazon family, we're excited to learn from and work closely with a team that is defining the future of the home, accelerate our mission, and bring Eero systems to more customers around the globe," said Nick Weaver, Eero's co-founder and CEO. Amazon isn't saying much about its future plans for Eero; might we see an Alexa-enabled router? An Echo that doubles as a Wi-Fi access point sounds nice. The report notes that Amazon will now have "more valuable data on consumers and advance Amazon's growing dominance of the smart home." Last year, Amazon acquired smart doorbell and camera maker Ring and bought Blink in 2017.
It sounds as though the Eero brand will live on after the acquisition -- at least in the near term. "By joining the Amazon family, we're excited to learn from and work closely with a team that is defining the future of the home, accelerate our mission, and bring Eero systems to more customers around the globe," said Nick Weaver, Eero's co-founder and CEO. Amazon isn't saying much about its future plans for Eero; might we see an Alexa-enabled router? An Echo that doubles as a Wi-Fi access point sounds nice. The report notes that Amazon will now have "more valuable data on consumers and advance Amazon's growing dominance of the smart home." Last year, Amazon acquired smart doorbell and camera maker Ring and bought Blink in 2017.
I bought eero since I was excited to fix my hard-to-cable apartment problems. They advertised on their front page "never reboot your router again!".
When I got them they failed to work well, and cabling the back-haul led to even worse performance. When you log into the support system, the first suggestion is "reboot your eero".
Great work, guys. So I returned it and got Plume and it kicks way more arse.
FWIW, eero doesn't say any more that you'll never reboot your router again, but it's still the first item in the trouble shooting guide. I'm not sure I've ever had to reboot any Plume nodes.
Eero was pretty nice they at least supported IPv6 eventually...
They had a feature of broadcasting multiple SSID for example creating a network just for the babysitters so you didnâ(TM)t have to give out your main network details...
What I would like is the ability to use 802.1X for logins on the wifi
So users could use their @gmail or @outlook etc and be given a certificate and I could be prompted to approve them on the guest network ( isolated )
That would be nice...
John
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Apple no longer makes router and now Amazon is selling those.
What's next? AmazonOS?
#DeleteFacebook
Maybe a captive portal that issues the 802.X certificates ?
for me to extend 2 or so neighbors networks into my house so I can cut all the cable bills.
I figure with 2 houses with 100MB if I could aggregate their connections, I would be pretty well off.
Like Google's routers I pretty much figure Amazon will also implement its own spyware into these devices.
but then I think about bad players getting in to the mesh and what issues could/might arise. Then I wonder if mesh is such a good idea. But the concept is attractive.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Remote control via the Internet is not permitted. Product is a complete pile of shit.
Boycott
A mesh network sounds cool - but I'm sorry Amazon, I'm still not buying anything with Alexa in it (without a hardware button on it, at least).
I know it all depends on your circumstances, and I've got cat6 all over the house so don't really need a mesh, but I've gotta say, one Ubiquiti AP fills pretty much every corner of my house with very fast wifi. It's got all the guest network and potentially logon-to-use features you might want too - all for the sake of one cat6 cable to the router.
That was enough to trigger a Trumpanista with modpoints? Conservacucks genuinely are the true snowflakes. Oh so white, and oh so fragile
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Eeros have no on-device configuration interface. That means if you want to set up your home WiFi, you have to use their Android or iOS app. And because the devices themselves must connect to the internet to download their configuration info, that means that if your Eeros don't have an internet configuration you don't have a home WiFi network. No watching movies or listening to MP3s on your Plex server. Your IP camera security system? Gone. That resume you have on your SAN and need to edit and get to a recruiter asap? You'll have to wait on that. IOT home automation? Turn off the effing lights in the garage the old fashioned way- by walking downstairs and flipping the switch. No internet connection, no wifi. That's the Eero way!
Configuration in "the cloud" means your home network is being configured by someone else, without you having any (true) input about who can and cannot access devices on it. Without even KNOWLEDGE of who is accessing the devices on it.
Eero is a security nightmare. Their model is "trust us, we'll keep you secure." That works as long as the entity you're trusting is trustworthy. Do you really want to give Amazon unfettered access to every device on your home network?
Even if you trust Amazon to not snoop (or don't care if they do), the lack of an on-device configuration feature means that the device is only "yours" until Eero (now Amazon) decides that the cloud-based configuration app costs too much to maintain. The day they make that decision, you'll try to log onto the app and see something like "can't connect" pop up. At which point your only option is to go to the store and buy new hardware. Your old Eeros will be beautiful stylish bricks. EXPENSIVE beautiful stylish bricks.
This whole device is based on the "it's too complicated for users to control" model of management. That might have been true in the days when your grandma and grandpa had issues with the blinking "12:00" on their VCRs. It's not true today, and even if it is, "in situ" automation is more than capable of compensating.