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.

Comments

I tried eero, they sucked

[Balial]

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.

Re:I tried eero, they sucked

[ayesnymous]

I researched mesh wireless systems recently, and among the reasons I decided against the Eero were slower speeds than competing products, inability to turn off automatic updates, and configuration must be done using a smartphone app (there is no web-based interface accessible via a PC browser).

Multiple SSIDâ(TM)s - I want SSO

[johnjones]

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

Re:Multiple SSIDâ(TM)s - I want SSO

[Strider-]

What I would like is the ability to use 802.1X for logins on the wifi

No, you don't really want this. I've managed a network with it, and with BYOD devices it's just a major pain in the ass to support and maintain.

What you want is a captive portal that can be used to sign on a device, and activate it. Keep it isolated from your network, and the security is good enough(tm).

Re:Multiple SSIDâ(TM)s - I want SSO

[rtb61]

Reality time, always wired connections first. Wireless is the cheap choice, wired is the high end choice. If all your connections in home are wireless you have made a mistake and need to redo your network, most of your connections, if not all long term connections, should be wired.

Re:Multiple SSIDâ(TM)s - I want SSO

[ebob9]

If I remember right, WPA2 natively supports 802.1x, via WPA2-Enterprise. All clients that support WPA2 should support it natively.

802.1x for Wired - yes, hell that sucks.

802.1x for Wifi - easy on client side. No supplicant issues because the supplicant is already used for the WPA2 stuff.

Hard part for WPA2-Enterprise is setting up auth database/RADIUS+TLS server/etc. If a home wifi vendor makes that easy/clouded/etc - could be nice!

Great...

[DontBeAMoran]

Apple no longer makes router and now Amazon is selling those.

What's next? AmazonOS?

So who makes a good mesh router

[bobstreo]

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.

Re: So who makes a good mesh router

[Anonymous Coward]

Just do it right not with this consumer crap. Wired APs and either bury fiber or use dedicated p-t-p WiFi backhaul then wired APs on the other end of the backhaul. Ubiquiti makes some some cheap p-t-p WiFi the nanobeam is a great product. I have data sharing with several locations a few miles apart that are part of the same company. Fuck mesh networks they are all expensive trash. And don't get those crap 'gaming' routers, segregate your hardware and do it right. Gateway, switches, APs hard ware anything that doesn't move. Only way to go.

Re: So who makes a good mesh router

[DontBeAMoran]

hard ware anything that doesn't move

And we're supposed to trust the advice of someone who can't even spell "hardwire"?

Re:Amazon will have another spy device

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, Amazon, Facebook represent far more danger to consumers than Huawei.

And bit by bit they are slowly getting pushed out of my house.

I keep wondering about mesh

[oldgraybeard]

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 ;)

Re: I keep wondering about mesh

[Voyager529]

What? none of this babble makes any sense. You are droning on about bad player or w/e, while thinking your dumbass consumer router is safe?

I'm just guessing a bit here, since I do the Ubiquiti thing in my house, but my guess is that it has to do with the implementation of these systems.

I don't think the expectation is that a $75 Linksys router is going to have the same firewall capabilities of a Meraki and is as resilient to targeted attacks. The issue is that while most garden variety routers are configured using a browser and a URL, these systems require an app, which requires an account be created with the company, and the router and nodes be tied to your account...that sort of thing.

It's one thing to question that a router might not be an impenetrable fortress or might possibly be sending data back to the mothership using its MAC address as a unique identifier. It's another for a router to explicitly require the user to provide personal information in order to shuffle packets in and out.

Re: I keep wondering about mesh

[gl4ss]

well the idea is that they sell is zero configuration mesh networking.

think about it. you'll get what he was babbling about.

Still... no

[coofercat]

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.

lol

[drinkypoo]

That was enough to trigger a Trumpanista with modpoints? Conservacucks genuinely are the true snowflakes. Oh so white, and oh so fragile