“Now you won’t have to go out and spend $400 on a whole mesh system.”ĮasyMesh hasn’t rolled out yet, however. “You’ll be able to hook up a $100 router that’s compatible with the mesh standard to your network and suddenly you’ll have a mesh network,” Fisco says. The Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry consortium that manages WiFi standards, has developed a new standard called EasyMesh that will let consumers create mesh networks composed of routers made by different companies-and sold for different prices. In the next few years, consumer options will increase even more, according to Fisco. “They didn’t jump on the mesh bandwagon early like Eero, but they’re there,” Fisco says. Other well-known manufacturers, including Arris, Google, Linksys, and Netgear, also produce mesh network routers-and several of these products do well in our ratings. Even without waiting for new products, consumers might benefit from deals when Amazon puts its own devices, such as Kindle e-readers and Echo Dot smart speakers, on sale.Įero was one of the first companies to popularize mesh networking, but consumers who want to steer clear of Amazon products have other options. A bundle of one Eero base station and one satellite unit currently costs $300, while Eero Plus, a subscription service that enables advanced malware protection and ad blocking, is $99 per year. Russell also says that the acquisition could lead to lower-priced options for Eero products. “At the end of the day, Amazon wants to optimize the whole connected home experience, and the easiest way to do that is for the hardware and networking to be aligned with one another,” he says. That way parents could, for example, tell Alexa to disconnect their children’s laptops from the internet so that they can put down “Fortnite” and come down for dinner. “If you can control the router and the user interface, then you’re golden.”Īmazon could eventually let users control their Eero router using Alexa voice commands, Russell says, making it easier to add or remove devices from the network, or turn off internet access to select devices. “A number of companies have been trying to address a very real pain point for consumers around their WiFi experience at home,” says Brad Russell, research director for the connected home at the Parks Associates research firm. For consumers, Amazon owning Eero could make it easier to set up and manage the wide range of wireless devices in their homes.
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