Ask people about their tech headaches and they'll tell you about
their home Wi-Fi networks. Balky, inconsistent connections are as
commonplace as they are maddening. A startup called Eero says it's going
to change all that.
Earlier this month, Eero began taking pre-orders for
a Wi-Fi system it says will fundamentally improve home connectivity
without making consumers jump through hoops connecting and reconfiguring their
networks. The idea seems to have struck a chord: The company says it sold
$1 million of routers in the first 48 hours.
If Eero can follow through, it will have solved a problem
the rest of the technology industry has failed to solve for years.
It has always been tricky to blanket an entire residence with a
high-quality wireless connection. But in recent years, customers’ expectations
have exploded, along with their appetites for streaming video and audio, making
the dead zones in the distant corners of their homes seem that much more
lifeless. While Linksys, D-Link, and other popular router manufacturers
have been marketing more powerful routers, the biggest problems with
home Wi-Fi can’t be solved with any one device. The sort of specs you
would find on the box of a home router can be deceptive. Stronger signals,
for instance, have shorter ranges.
The best way to improve the performance of a home
Wi-Fi network is to increase the number of radios sending out a wireless
signal. There are various ways to do this. Wi-Fi extenders are common
and can be relatively cheap, but they aren’t very efficient at transmitting a
signal, and they add a layer of complexity that could drive you nuts.
Hard-wiring additional ethernet access points is very effective but can amount
to a project.
In businesses and public places, connections are often
offered through mesh networking—multiple devices that each serve as
receiver and transmitter of a signal. This spreads the Internet
equally throughout the air in the network and sends devices to the
most logical access point, based on their locations.
Mesh networks have consumer applications as well. Sonos,
which sells Internet-connected speakers, creates a mesh network among its
devices to play music throughout a home. Open Garden uses mesh networks to let
people participate in a kind of online chat that doesn't require a
connection to the Internet.
We haven't yet seen a good use of mesh networking for home
Wi-Fi, but it’s the logical future, according to Tim Higgins, managing editor
of the Wi-Fi-focused website, SmallNetBuilder.com. “The key thing that
Eero is doing is really bringing mesh to the consumer,” he
says. “It’s a big deal if it works.”
Nick Weaver, Eero's co-founder and chief executive, says other
companies haven't built mesh networks for consumer devices because it's hard to
do so without rewriting all the code that runs the systems. Many router
companies outsource the code that runs their devices, and they may rely on
systems that are over a decade old. Eero designed its hardware and
software from scratch. "It basically all comes down to the
software," Weaver says.
The appeal of Eero at the moment is conceptual because reviewers
and customers haven’t had a chance to test the system. The company says it
will begin shipping pre-orders this summer.
In addition to a stronger Wi-Fi signal, Eero devices serve
as Bluetooth connection points. They create home-wide Bluetooth networks, an
additional form of wireless connectivity, generally used to communicate signals
between two devices within a few feet of one another. These innovations are
potentially exciting to people who understand and care about home
networking.
Eero will need to get beyond those customers. So it
is following the same home-appliance-as-iPhone strategy that Nest
has pursued for thermostats and smoke detectors. The Eero
even kind of looks like the Nest thermostat. The company boasts that this is
one router you won’t feel inspired to hide in that dusty area behind your
TV stand.
It’s hard to see many people buying a wireless router just
because it's an elegant white square instead of an ugly black
rectangle. The bigger draws are likely to be the promise of a quick setup
that takes place entirely on a smartphone, or an easy way to let
house guests connect devices to the network. As with the core networking
functionality, we just have to trust Eero on how well these features work
at this point.
Eero also resembles Nest in its price premium. The company said
it would raise its prices to $199 for a single unit, up from the $125 it
initially charged, and $499 for a three-pack (up from $299). Higgins of SmallNetBuilder.com
says demand for wireless routers drops off sharply once customers are asked to
spend more than $300. Even if Eero has developed
a fundamentally superior Wi-Fi router, he thinks it is unlikely
that many people will spend $500 for something they’d rather never think
about.
“That’s a little steep for what’s basically a science
experiment at this point,” he says.
Eero's Weaver says people often spend nearly that much on
home networks, once they've bought an expensive router and a few range extenders.
But he acknowledges that Eero is raising prices partly to limit demand to what
the company could actually deliver on schedule. "Over time, as you
hit larger scale, price becomes a flexible thing," he says.
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