Pre-order update
August 2015
eero supporters & friends,
It’s September 1st, and we owe everyone an update on August, our most exciting month yet. We now have eero systems up and running in the homes of our nearly 50 employees, and have begun rolling out to an additional 200 homes as part of our larger beta program. The hardware that we’ll be shipping to you this fall is locked. It’s now all about fine-tuning our software and app while ramping manufacturing. We’ll send another update soon with our ship date and instructions for getting us your current address.
Test, test, test
Early indicators of performance are incredibly promising. In some cases we’ve improved WiFi speeds relative to testers’ old equipment by 300% to 400%. And this isn’t just right next an eero unit, this is throughout the entire home. We’ve believed in eero’s entirely new WiFi model — a system that’s distributed throughout your home — since the beginning, but it’s great that our friends and family now share our excitement.
Testers have provided incredibly useful feedback on setup that we’re working quickly to incorporate. We’re optimizing every step — for instance, how quickly a new eero will sync with the cloud — to make everything as fast as possible. The experience is smooth and fun — almost like a game as you wipe out dead zones.
A new home WiFi model
The challenge with WiFi is that people haven’t realized that it’s actually something that can be fixed. There’s been a grudging acceptance that it’s just the way it is — like the DMV or airline food. The positive reaction from the press and consumers to both eero’s pre-order and Google’s recent announcement of its OnHub router is a sign that this acceptance is beginning to erode.
We love OnHub’s focus on simplicity, quick setup, and management from an app. But no matter how powerful, a single router is never going to cover an entire home. It’s like asking a very bright light bulb in your living room to light your entire home. The problem is simple physics. WiFi waves have limited range and don’t go through walls well — especially the 5 GHz waves in the new 802.11ac standard. If your router’s at the opposite end of your home from the bedroom, there are a lot of walls in between. The WiFi signal degrades with each wall, and you can’t catch up on Instagram before bed.
What you need is a set of WiFi access points — devices that broadcast WiFi — running the length of the home. Until now, it’s been really hard to do this, usually requiring ethernet wiring to connect them all, not to mention a network engineering degree. eero devices set up automatically and connect wirelessly using our mesh networking technology, and only one needs to be plugged into your modem. The links between eeros are stable and strong, and data — say, Netflix’s latest and greatest — hops from one to the next as it moves through your home. Whatever room you’re in, you’re always close to an eero and have a great WiFi signal. Three eeros cover the typical US home, but you don’t need to stop there.
eero will be the only distributed WiFi solution available on the consumer market. It’s the future of home WiFi and how we make dead zones a thing of the past. We couldn’t be more excited to introduce it to the world. In the meantime if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out at earlyadopters@eero.com.
We’re in the home stretch,
-Nick
P.S. The eero team continues to grow, and we’re always looking for great new team members in software and hardware engineering, product, marketing, operations, and support. Please check out all of our open positions here: https://medium.com/jobs-eero.
