The Eero router and the Beacon have another differentiating feature: a Thread radio. The Beacon has an integrated nightlight that adjusts its brightness according to ambient light conditions. If you find the light intrusive, you can turn it off in the app. The nightlight isn’t as bright as the one on the latest SnapPower Guidelight outlet cover, but it provides good-enough path lighting. It’s a cool and thoughtful feature, and it will encourage you to place the Beacons out in the open where they’ll be the most effective. You can dial the time in precisely enough, but the schedule will be the same for every day of the week, there’s no accommodation for daylight savings time, and you can’t set it to come on at dusk and off at dawn. You can use the Eero app to program it to turn and off at designated times. Eero’s is by far the smallest and the most attractive, and it has a unique and very thoughtful feature: an integrated LED nightlight.Īn ambient light sensor on the Beacon will automatically turn the nightlight on when it’s dark, and the light’s intensity will scale with the room’s light. We first saw it with Ubiquiti Labs’ Amplifi HD, and Netgear has a new Orbi model with a plug-in satellite, too (I have one in my review queue now). Path lighting? In an access point?Įero’s Beacon-which, incidentally, is backward-compatible with the first-generation Eero router-isn’t a new concept. Netgear’s router-plus-satellite Orbi wasn’t always the fastest, but it was always much faster than the Eero 2. The Eero 2’s performance is represented by the light olive-green bar. The Eero 2 was faster than the original product in every location-with both a Windows and a Mac laptop client-except one: the bedroom, where the clients are in the same room as the router and separated by nine feet of air. Most everywhere else, the Eero 2 finished in the middle of the pack. When the client was an HP Envy running Windows 10, the Eero 2 took second place in the home theater. Interestingly, that location was my home theater, a spot that most wireless devices have difficulty penetrating because of the thickness of its walls and ceiling and the presence of acoustic caulk sandwiched between its multiple layers of drywall. A mid-range performerīut when you look at the benchmark charts below, you’ll see that while the new Eero (I’ll call it Eero 2 from here) is much faster than the first-generation product, it was the fastest mesh router in the field of eight that I’ve tested to date in only one location in my home, and that was with a MacBook Pro as the client. The router delivered triple-digit throughput in every room of my 2800-square-foot home-more than enough bandwidth to support several HD video streams simultaneously. Eero says the $399 kit reviewed here is suitable for a three- to four-bedroom home, and I agree. It’s also more powerful, thanks to a new Qualcomm mesh Wi-Fi router chipset and a tri-band Wi-Fi radio. The second-generation Eero Home WiFi System is even easier to set up than the first, thanks to wireless access points called Beacons that plug straight into AC outlets.
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