I have had an AMPLIFI Alien setup for five years now that has been very solid. One of my Aliens is starting to fail and it looks like AMPLIFI won’t be making or supporting them anymore. I have been researching all the big brands of mesh systems out there and a lot of people seem to recommend the Eero brand. They like to compare it to Apple products in the sense it “just works” along with being stable and dependable. I seem to remember five years ago researching before I bought the Aliens that Apple devices had connectivity issues with Eero. Just curious to those with the newer Eero systems how they have been in general and also with your Apple devices. Currently looking at the Eero Max 7 setup, 3 nodes with wireless backhaul.
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Internet Mesh System Advice
- Thread starter butterwm
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I've never had a problem with eeros at my family's house with Apple stuff. They've always worked flawlessly. I don't need mesh at my house, but if I did, I'd probably go with Linksys Velop. I've heard great things, and I don't like the fact that Amazon owns eero for privacy reasons.
Prior to my Alien setup I tried a Linksys Velop and Netgear Orbi. They both weren’t good and the Velop was the worse. Constant connection issues and the nodes always dropping off line and having to be rebooted. I know it’s been 5 years and the technology has advanced quite a bit but I am scared going back to that brand.
I tried Velop and returned as quickly as I can when I recognized all the issues with it. I am sadly using my ISPs hub.
I am personally exploring a Ubiquity setup my self.
I can vouch for Ubiquiti in a small business setting - loved it.
Synology makes competitively priced and solid performing Wi-Fi routers with mesh support.
I have looked at some of the Ubiquity stuff it just becomes a complicated setup for home. Got a lot of feedback from people who went that road that like it but it requires a lot of maintenance and tweaking.
Set up eero at my mom's house and seems to work very well with mainly Apple environment. Sometimes seems to have issues with connection freezing from devices, and there was one oddball thing connecting to a Brother printer over wifi. But does seem very much like a "just works" solution - easy to set up, iPhone app is straightforward, etc. (The upsells in app to additional Eero services is a bit annoying though . . . )
I have Ubiquity/Unifi in my own home, and while it is versatile and they have lots of product variety, I agree it is a bit fussy for most home users. If you're a "power user" and want to do things like have guest networks, IoT VLANs, and more sophisticated mesh products (e.g., a wall mount repeater with ethernet jacks) then it's the way to go. The setup and app have gotten a lot better in the last couple of years as well, and it's more stable (my main router used to freeze every so often (60+ days) requiring a hard restart, but that's gone away.) I'd consider it "prosumer" level.
I went with Asus. Just pick any of their routers for your main router and then buy another one for the mesh nodes. Even older routers work fine. There is no hard limit on how many routers you can connect but one thing about ALL mesh networks: USE A WIRED BACKHAUL. Otherwise, you use up you WiFi bandwidth pushing data between nodes. It is not hard to pull Ethernet wire. It is low volts so the electric code does not apply.
Yes, Eero makes it easy with wireless backhaul but the result is not so good, half or more of the bandwidth is taken up with backhaul. And you paid more than twice as much as needed. Even a $60 Asus off eBay makes a good mesh node.
You pay a lot in both dollars and performance for Eeros' no-brain setup.
I have an old eero. The only one I tried other than eero is Google Drive, which performs significantly worse