Eero uses “largest consumer mesh network dataset” to boost Wi-Fi performance

Eero—the mesh Wi-Fi router company that hit the market early last year—has announced a major update for its little white boxes. The company has come up with a new software wrinkle it calls "TrueMesh technology," which should boost the performance of its devices' mesh Wi-Fi networks. The company is also adding support for some handy Amazon Alexa voice commands.

TrueMesh is a redesign of Eero's mesh technology "from the ground up," to "understand and navigate a network’s topology in real-time." From the start, Eero has pitched itself as a "cloud-based" mesh router—"anonymized performance and diagnostic data" is collected from all Eero customers and used to make the performance of the system better. Now that the Eero has been on the market for almost two years, the company says it has compiled "the largest-ever consumer mesh network dataset" with "hundreds of millions of data points." With all this aggregate data Eero can tweak the router's settings and boost performance.

In an interview with Ars prior to the announcement, Eero CEO Nick Weaver explained that the extra speed comes from optimizing the Eero device configurations, including better channel usage and more aggressive device connection and disconnection. The press release says it will "dynamically find the best route to pass data through a network and quickly switch paths to avoid any interference" and promises a 40-percent LAN speed boost on "the average network," with some hitting a 2x performance increase. Weaver also told Ars that the Eero mesh devices support native Wi-Fi roaming via 802.11k, v, and r.

If you have an Amazon Echo, Eero is also adding support for some Alexa voice commands.

Eero customers can ask Alexa to:

• Find a misplaced device in the home—If a device (such as a phone or laptop) is still in the home and connected to Wi-Fi, customers can ask Alexa which eero their device is connected to so they know where to look.
• Pause the Internet—Using Family Profiles, pause the Internet for dinner or other family moments. Nothing vital—eg, security cameras—should go offline. Simply use the eero app to unpause and get everything back online.
• Turn off the LED—Customers can ask Alexa to turn off the LED light on eero for bedtime, which has been a top-requested feature from current customers. This feature is also now available through the eero app.

There are also some new app features, which will suggest placement locations for the Eero routers, show connection strength and data usage for devices, and show which router each device is connected to. The upgrade will work on all existing Eero devices, so current customers don't have to buy anything new—you just have to sit tight and wait. Eero says the features will be "slowly rolled out to all customers over the next few weeks."

Listing image by Eero