Eero available "soon" in the UK!

The topic of mesh routers crops up fairly frequently here so I thought this might be of interest to UK based MPU’ers.

I believe previously you could get Eero units imported but then couldn’t actually activate them or something which pretty much ruled them out as an option for those of us here in the UK.

Just seen on Amazon.co.uk’s front page: “introducing eero”, product page here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07WHMJ6XN

Also appears there’s a “pro” model. Looks like they’ve had a bit of a re-design & currently showing as “coming soon”.

Could be worth a look for anyone considering buying a new mesh system.

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You can import them and they still works, can be activated with an email address. I have eero imported from US and is running fine in my home in Malaysia.

If you’re planning to make an investment that lasts years, wait until there is some competition for WiFi 6 hardware to bring the price down. So far only Netgear has announced WiFi 6 mesh for its Orbi line (supposedly shipping next week), but without competition the initial price is US $700. It maintains the 4x4 backhaul of the current Orbi units but with WiFi 6 it has a theoretical link of 2.4 Gbps compared to 1.73 Gbps on the older Orbi RBK50, has 8 gigabit Ethernet LAN ports in total (four each on the router and satellite) and a 2.5Gbps WAN port. If you’re surrounded by competing WiFi networks (eg you live in an apartment building, or use it in an office setting) WiFi 6 will be a godsend that offers faster WiFi, better battery life for mobile devices that use it (like the new iPhones), and battles congestion.

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That may somewhat depend on where you are located.

I am not an expert, but I believe the reason that they are not available everywhere is that the frequencies they are required to use are different in different parts of the world, so if you have them running with frequency settings based on being in the USA, you could be causing interference to other devices in your country.

Now it’s possible that you could do that and it wouldn’t cause any problems because there are no other devices in the area, but if you were in a heavily populated area (say like London) the chances are very high that there would be.

At least in the USA you can get fined for causing that kind of unlicensed interference, and they’d probably confiscate your equipment as well.

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@Topre, I remember reading some reviews of the old units on the uk amazon; people had contacted Eero support, found that the units could not be made to work in this country and had returned them. I don’t know if that was a problem that was eventually solved and if the problem was just a business / policy thing or (as @tjluoma points out) a frequency thing.
Glad they’re working for you in Malaysia though. :slight_smile:

Those new ones look pretty interesting. Netgear’s website also points out that older versions didn’t support daisy chaining and needed to be positioned in a star / hub & spoke arrangement. However, the new ones / new firmware does now support daisy chaining which is excellent news. It was quite a while ago that I was buying a mesh system, at the time: the Orbi’s not being able to do daisy chaining was probably the key thing that ruled them out for me.

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A WiFi 6 mesh is probably #1 on my 2020 wishlist, but not at that price. I’d love to see what Ubiquiti, Plume, and Synology (they make great routers) will be coming out with next year.

I’m still limping along at home with an Apple Airport Extreme base station and a couple of Airport Expresses joined to it. It’s solid but relatively slow, and my building and neighborhood are packed with WiFi units, which affects my s/n and therefore connect speeds. I could really use WiFi 6 and a mesh network with it would hold me for years.

Since Malaysia adopted many of the standards from UK, I suspect our telco and internets are probably the same - using an age old protocol called PPPoE. Eero doesn’t support PPPoE and I think these new Eero, which have the same guts as the current Eero Pro (minus one radio band) will have the same issue in UK or Malaysia.

The only way to get Eero to work is in bridge mode, meaning you connect your Eero to your current telco issued router. The setup is a gateway modem connected to router and connect Eero to this router. You will have to disable the WiFi on the router. It’s not an ideal setup but it works very well.

There have been many petitions to get Eero to support PPPoE but it seems to be a technical and architecture challenge and they have no plans to support this in future.

But, what @tjluoma said about interference is pretty valid though, so let’s see.

@bowline, Yikes! That is rather busy! I can see wifi 6 making your situation a lot better. Another one for your shortlist might be the TP-Link Deco x10 when that comes out.
I’ve currently got the Deco M9’s; in terms of improving WIFI coverage they’ve done the job although I’m a little grumpy at the lack of tools in the admin app. I’d have expected there to be MAC address whitelisting & it’d have been nice if it reported link quality / speed between the nodes. I’d also like to be able to see which device is connected to which node but that feature seems to be missing too.
Aside from that; they’re getting signal to where I need it so that’s a win at least.

@Topre,

AH! That might have been the problem, can’t remember for sure though. Lets hope they’ve sorted that out else it’ll seriously curtail their uptake.

I just got an email from Amazon saying both the Eero and the Eero Pro are available on amazon.de!

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Anyone picked up the Eero Pro now it’s available in the UK? I’m thinking about picking up three pack to use with BT Infinity but it has very mixed reviews so far.

In a year’s time everyone will be rolling out WiFi 6-compatible mesh networks with faster and more stable connections. Right now a couple of companies (Netgear and someone else whose name I’ve forgotten) announced their first WiFi 6 units, but they’re around US $700. That price will fall fast as competition appears.