Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsIt’s all about stability.
Reviewed in Australia on 8 May 2021
Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. This isn’t the router for you if raw performance is what you’re after. Download speeds top around the 750mbps region running gigabit fibre (on both my devices). That’s about 50-100mbps less than it’s competition, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (I’ll get back to this in a sec). Understandably gigabit speeds isn’t a luxury everyone can have, so ping speeds perhaps would be worth looking at. But once again, nothing much to write home about. Running terminal on an M1 mac saw speeds of about 4-6ms. Interestingly however, I saw similar ping speeds with the 2nd gen eero cupcakes while downloads where in the 600mbps ballpark (500mbps on my iPhone 12)
But these aren’t even negatives to everyone’s eye. Here are the positives then. Set up process is second to none. These top the google wifi systems for having a killer intuitive (and polished-ly good looking) app. But eero’s strongpoint is in its motto - stability. These systems sacrifice that small bit of performance for the pursuit of stability and it delivers. I didn’t face any downtime, slowdowns or anomalies that made me felt like it needed a restart. That’s a departure from my first taste in wifi 6 with tp-link’s Deco X60. That had even better performance but had poor band steering and fast roaming (the bit that switches which wifi point you’re connected to). Then one of its puck got stuck into a boot loop and is now serving as paperweight (even the physical reset button does nothing). This experience is why I value stability / reliability so much because in the end of the day what we want is something that just works!
Final thoughts, If you’ve gotten the eero cupcakes, don’t be tempted. They have about 90% of what’s offered anyway. Otherwise, if you’re fed up with the stability of your current set up I doubt these will disappoint.
(I hope you’ll enjoy them :))
Things to note:
- Speedtests are by no means technical.
- Optimised for video conference and gaming (SQM) turned on didn’t show any noticeable difference. I kept it on for the event where friends are over and decide to hog my upload speeds (only 50mbps lol)
- It’s worth pointing out that the wifi 6 eeros are having some bad rep with really poor performance. Fortunately I’m not experiencing anything I’ve read so far (hence why I felt the need to shed light of the other direction)
