Eero, the lovely little router system that disperses reliable Wi-Fi throughout your home, does not have a new product. It does, though, have a significant software boost that rolls out starting today---including an Alexa skill that’s going to make finding lost smartphones so much easier.
The headliner of the rollout is what Eero calls TrueMesh, a nod to the mesh network smarts that make it so dependable. Thanks to deep analysis of how existing customers use their Eero routers---and where they stumble---the company has overhauled its mesh routing algorithms. More simply put, your Eero routers will talk to each other and to your devices better, to the tune of up to double the speed between routers for some customers.
Eero’s able to make that large an improvement because it keeps close track of how every single one of its products performs in the wild.
“The type of information we collect is if Eeros are up and running, how hot are they getting, how much memory are they using, how fast are their connections between one another, what types of devices they’re connecting to, and what types of device may or may not be having connection challenges,” says Eero CEO Nick Weaver. (For the privacy hawks among you, there’s no way to opt out of this data collection, though Weaver says there’s “nothing identifiable” about the information.)
Parsing that data is a team of data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts tasked with identifying pain points. “You start looking through things like exceptions, are you starting to see a big uptick in specific types of alerts based on different versions of software, different types of devices talking to the Eero network,” says Weaver. “Then you can start triangulating in on if a new feature is working as intended, or if we’re starting to see elevated problems in the field.”
Eero already has an earned reputation for solid performance, and intra-router speeds won’t do anything to make Comcast pump bandwidth to your house faster.
Still, better is better! But best is one of Eero’s other announcements today: An Alexa skill to help you find your phone.
Eero won’t be the first router to play nice with Alexa and the Amazon Echo, and that mash-up for now include skills that are both expected (you can “pause” the internet to keep people off their devices during dinner time) and minor (you can turn of the Eero router’s LED light). There’s one voice-command, though, that will be if not life-altering, certainly life-improving.
Missing your phone or laptop or any other device? Just ask Alexa where it is! It can’t give you exact coordinates, but it can tell you what Eero router it’s nearest to. It’s possible that I lose my phone more than the average phone-haver, and it’s possible that most people who do lose their phones are much better at finding them than I am. But! If you are as hopeless as I am, this comes as welcome help.
More importantly, it’s another skill that benefits directly from Eero’s deep knowledge of its devices and its customers. One in five Eero households has an Echo in it, says Weaver, which is why the company committed to the integration in the first place. And an Eero router’s continuous self-assessment makes it a perfect search and rescue assistant.
Eero has a new app as well, which gives you more insight into how well your devices are connecting to the network, and which use the most data. Most of all though, today’s suite of announcements are about knowing they’ve got a little more zip, and should be a lot easier to find.
