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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.
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).
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Apple no longer makes router and now Amazon is selling those.
What's next? AmazonOS?
#DeleteFacebook
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.
Google, Amazon, Facebook represent far more danger to consumers than Huawei.
And bit by bit they are slowly getting pushed out of my house.