NEW Amazon eero Pro Mesh Wi-Fi System

The most helpful and critical review posted back in February 2018 highlights persistent problems with the eero devices. While initially they work very well, you're just gambling that you never have a problem with your network setup or device. After two months, my eero pro suddenly lost connection to the internet. I tried rebooting the device and it did come back up...for about five or ten minutes. It was stuck in some kind of "reboot" cycle. There were no indications on my modem that the actual internet connection was down, and no outage reported by my ISP. I was able to call them at 5 minutes to closing and thankfully they picked up and spent the next 90 minutes trying to help troubleshooting the issue. I really appreciate them taking so much time to help, but it ended quickly towards the end with finger pointing at my ISP. Eero support is significantly disadvantaged when troubleshooting problems like connection issues. Their only available option is to ask you to turn off the modem and router and turn them back on. They don't have logging they can pull or advanced tooling. They only have what you have: the app. If they have more tooling, they never let on. I was told they were "checking _other_ things", but wouldn't say what that was or if I'd be able to do the same thing next time the device crashed and it was after phone support hours. My setup is very simple: a eero pro, eero beacon, and an eight port switch. Total, I think there were about 60 devices on my network (I've got a lot of smart devices: Alexa, Google, Weemo, etc.). My troubleshooting included: 1. Removing the Beacon 2. Removing the switch and all connected devices 3. Remove all Alexa devices 4. Remove all Google devices 5. Swapping cable modem for a new one 6. Swapping eero router for old router 7. Turning the modem and router off and on about 20 or more times The only thing that worked was using my old router. Eero was almost confused when I suggested the eero device could be the problem and I wanted a replacement to test. I told them all of the measures I took and was told they need to escalate to someone to check if they could send a replacement device (making sure to ask me how long I had the device). They came back and didn't address finding a replacement and immediately wanted to continue to troubleshoot by turning things on and off again. I spoke with them honestly and said usually the device crashes after 10 minutes. We spent about 30 minutes to an hour going through this cycle again. They stayed on the line for 10 minutes after we tried the last reboot and about 30 seconds after that they said: "well everything is working fine now" and rushed to end the call. If anything continued to have problems, I would have to replace my modem because obviously it can't at all be the eero devices. Two minutes after the call ended the device crashed again. The support model just doesn't work for in home networks. The best place to troubleshoot network connectivity issues is on the troubled network, not over the phone and across "the cloud". I think it's best to sum up eero with: "When it works, it works really well and is a very easy and nice setup. When it doesn't work, it's bad." Pros + Phone support: Their phone support is responsive. Short wait times, and they will wait on the phone for quite a while. I needed to shut down my 5GHz band to setup a irrigation controller, and the agent stayed on the line with me for about 30 or 40 minutes while I was waiting and talking to the other company when the setup failed. He even found the irrigation company's number for me. + Easy setup: it took more than the 5 - 10 minutes they said it would to initially setup the network, but it really is pretty fool proof. The process is just slower than advertise, but faster than if you tried to setup and configure your own network. Cons: - Network management: You really can't do much with their app. Everything in there is too simple. You want to shut off your 5GHz band because a device can only connect over 2? You have to call into support to do that. Oh, and they wait on the line the whole time you need it down so they can turn it back on. I guess they don't trust you to call them back later. The reasoning this option isn't available per their agent: they use the 2 GHz band to communicate and manage the mesh network and they don't want people messing with the setting and breaking their network. That makes sense, but when I asked about putting in the option with notices, a timeout that would reenable it after X minutes, and burying it in some advanced menus, they refused. Not flat out dismissive, but that Jedi mind trick Customer Service way of convincing you you're mistaken and actually they're right while just giving you the canned "we'll share that feedback with the team" (which really means it's just blackhole'd into the suggestion bin over the trash can). - No management tools for troubleshooting: If you have any other connection or stability issues, you have no way to manage the network yourself. There's no device you can connect to in your browser to see an admin console, there's no logs you can pull to track down what's going on in the device or on your network, or any advanced configuration settings you can try changing. Sure, the app has some configurations you can toggle on and off, but you don't actually connect to your local eero device. The app sends everything to the cloud so you have to wait for your device to magically connect back to the eero servers and pull down the latest configurations. - No network when no internet: While your device loses internet connection, you aren't able to connect to the eero. Maybe it was my bad device, but ever time it "lost" connection all of my devices were kicked from the network. This means I wasn't able to connect to my local media server and watch movies while we waited for the internet to come back up. Eero kicks you back to the stone age. - Limited support tools: When you contact support, there's not much they can do for troubleshooting. Per their agents, they only have access to the same information you are shown in the app. They don't have any kind of logging they can pull from the device to see what might have caused a crash. They only have the last date and time the device joined the internet....and ONLY that single date. So when you tell them you've been having connection problems, they only think it's been the ONE time and start troubleshooting all over again. - Misleading advertising: eero pages say each device can handle up to 128 connected devices at a time, but eero support made it a point to highlight and warn me that too many devices (about 36) were connected to a single eero device and this could cause problems. Why then do you say in your documentation you can support so many if you struggle to get past less than a third of your documented numbers? - Limited phone support hours: Count yourself lucky if you ever get a problem with a device during their support hours. Ya, they do have phone support you can call, but they close down at 5pm Pacific. Without any management tooling, you're only left with trying to unplug the device and plugging it back in. If that doesn't fix the problem, I guess the advice should be go read a book or something, and spend your vacation time because you can't work.