Back in early 2022 I tried out the eero Pro 6. At the time it was a great WiFi mesh router, with excellent coverage, signal strength and ease of installation. I sought out the eero Max 7 to see what the team have been doing in the intervening thirty-two months since.
First Impressions
The eero Pro 6 were small units, with a footprint smaller than a sheet of A5 paper and under five centimeters tall.
When I pulled the eero Max 7 out of the packaging, it was massive in comparison. A monolith of rounded corners and all gloss white that dwarfs the predecessor.
The front is pretty blank. A large slab of gloss white with the eero name boldly blazed across the middle in silver. A single LED near the top of the unit gives an indication of the status. When you first power it on, it’s slow blinking in blue showing it is ready for pairing to your phone.
Around the back are two 10 GbE ports and and two 2.5 GbE ports.
The power input is a USB-C, and the provided cable is hard wired into an adaptor.
Setting Up
Since I reviewed the eero Pro 6 in 2022, I have completely redesigned my home network. My current needs are very different and there was a great deal of trepidation in changing my router for this review. I did as much planning for this cutover as I would for a commercial client. Even then I accepted that some essential connectivity will be broken.
One thing I do love about the eero is just how simple it is to get it up and running.
There is no web interface on the device and everything is done via the eero app. You will of course, need an Amazon account to proceed. You also will need the network cable from your NBN router plugged into one of the four ports in the back of the eero Max 7 and the unit powered on.
While you are there, it is highly recommended to restart your NBN router to clear the mac address table.
To configure your eero, just simply follow the wizard. It only takes a few minutes to get the basics up and running.
The app will look for the eero hardware via Bluetooth, so you do want to stay close-ish to it with your phone. Once that is discovered, it will then check for an internet connection before looking for updates.
My ISP does not require any special configuration, my connection came straight back up within the thirty minutes change of router timeout period.
There was a firmware update waiting for me when my unit came online, and eero automatically scheduled it for 2am to update. Ha joke’s on you eero, cos I am generally still working away at that time. This was easily rescheduled in the interface.
In Use
As I mentioned earlier, I have some very specific networking setup for my home network. In fact I frequently joke that if I was to drop dead tomorrow, just wipe the networking and hook up the two Synology and the Proxmox server. Whatever services you can hit there will be the core and forget everything else.
There is such a mix of technologies and services that it would be unlikely for anyone to unravel it all in any reasonable amount of time.
The eero app makes everything essentially plug and play. If you are a standard household with little in the way of special requirements, there is hardly anything to do. You would be unlikely to care about which subnet is in use. DHCP is turned on by default so all your devices will just reconnect to the wireless SSID automatically, if you are using the same name and password.
A few thoughts on the base eero capabilities. From my experience it has remain largely unchanged from when I reviewed the eero Pro 6.
Obviously with the naming convention, we have moved from WiFi 6 to WiFi 7 here. The heart of the mesh routers remain the same in terms of capability and functionalities. Just a lot faster if your devices can handle it.
I have a WiFi 7 capable laptop which connects to the eero 7 at ludicrous speeds. Although my previous router was no slouch, the WiFi 7 and 10GbE ports at the back made my local access chalk and cheese.
Looking at the app home screen. At a glance you get the status of your internet connection, the health of your eero network, the number of devices online and offline, and recently connected devices. These are all there front and center.
To get more information you can just tap into each device or section to get a more detailed view and statistics such as the connection speed, and how much data has been transferred.
That is pretty much what the standard users need.
Looking at my notebook WiFi connection, I have a link speed of 2594 / 864 Mbps. Like, I feel like I need a glass of water to put the fire out at some stage.
My Specific Needs
For me I care about the subnet my devices are on, a lot.
My primary core network runs on a specific Class C range. I have multiple Synology Diskstations on statically assigned IPs. There is a Proxmox host running, with multiple virtual instances that services much of the various parts of my network and deliver self-hosted apps.
I also have separate SSID for IoT devices and guest connections. These are configured on a specific Class B range and there are networking rules in place to facilitate communications for specific services.
In effective I have an enterprise grade mindset in my networking configuration to minimise the exposed attack vectors of my core infrastructure. There is much more to it of course, but I am not going to document the details here. 🙂
eero Plus subscription
To push the capabilities of your eero Max 7, you will need to subscribe to eero Plus.
Reading back on my older review on the eero Pro 6, there does not seem to be much changed in the functionalities here.
The subscription can be paid monthly (AIUD $16.99) or annually (AUD$159.99), and provides:
- malware and security protection
- family parental controls
- connect privately with vpn
- network health and data insight
With the exception of a scheduled pause which is available for free, the value adds are all locked behind a paywall.
So if you are wanting to block apps or content filter, you will need the eero Plus subscription. Tis is a topical issue right now, and I wrote a fairly long editorial about the proposed legislation.
Other Features
One function that is available without the subscription is profiles. You group devices into profiles, for example, a child’s smart phone and laptop can be in the same profile where you can manage it together.
You can schedule a pause on their internet access through here. Or if you have the eero Plus subscription you can control their traffic and apps in more granular fashion.
In the case of the younger children, I would be needing:
- Advanced protection
- SafeSearch
- Content filtering
- Block/Allow websites as I discover gaps in the coverage
It is a powerful tool when you have groups of users with differing levels of needs and maturity. The only requirement from an administration perspective is to make sure the correct devices are assigned to the profiles.
From a hardware perspective the eero Max 7 doubles as a smart home hub. This is great news as you would not need separate controllers for Thread, Matter and Zigbee devices.
This means some of the unnecessary traffic can be removed from WiFi and pushed to one of the other protocols for better management and resilience.
Extending the Network
The eero Max 7 is a mesh WiFi network router, which means you can extend your coverage with another unit.
However in a very recent announcement, compatible Echo devices now have eero Built-in, which means you can add them into the eero mesh network to boost your coverage.
Amazon was kind enough to send me an Echo Dot 5th gen to try this out.
Getting the Echo Dot to be part of your mesh network was relatively straightforward. First you have to add the Echo Dot via the Alexa app. This was a quick and straightforward process. The app found the device automatically and asked if I want to set it up.
Once that is done, the device will then show up under the eero app as part of your wireless network.
There is of course a catch to this. eero Built-in can only extend the main SSID. Secondly, the extended coverage speed is limited to what wireless standard the eero Built-in device is compatible with. In this case the Echo Dot is max out at 802.11ac, which is WiFi 5.
If you want to extend your coverage for both main and guest SSID, you will have to add a full eero unit into the mix.
However, if you just want WiFi coverage in the far corner of your house for music streaming for example, this would be the ideal low cost solution with the added benefit of a smart home device that can do much more with Alexa skills.
Gripes
I do have complaints, but here is where I need to be careful and fair.
As a home router, the eero Max 7 is simple to set up and gives excellent coverage and some incredible connection speeds. It just bothers me a lot that the settings caters only to the lowest common denominator – end users with little technical knowledge.
For me even thought it has been quite a while, I still remember how to manually configure the subnet range in the settings. But I can only do that for the main SSID.
Aside from creating your own SSID and password for the guest network, there is no other options to configure anything there. I can’t set the subnet for my IoT range. Further I can’t configure any rules between my main SSID and the guest SSID. It breaks everything I have configured segregating insecure devices from my core infrastructure.
While I get that I am not the kind of target market for eero, but it just felt to me that the lack of options is a little crippling. That said though, eero is hardly the only vendor in the market that has been stuck on this track.
Conclusions
The eero Max 7 is a marvel of design and hardware engineering. It comes with WiFi 7, and two 2.5GbE and two 10 GbE ports. This beast is future proof.
However I feel let down by the software experience, which I feel has made little progress since 2022 when I reviewed the previous generation.
Part of my disappointment stems from the fact that this is a AUD$1099.99 device, with some of the latest and greatest standards baked into it, but stuck with an ancient approach to networking. There is a lot of bandwidth available to have another SSID available for example. As I keep harping on, we really need users to understand the need to separate IoT devices from other networks, just as you would push guests to their own WiFi SSID to protect your own data.
That said, if you have some fairly standard networking requirements, but a need for speed, the eero Max 7 delivers that performance in spades.
What is also handy is that selected Echo devices can be part of the mesh network to extend the WiFi coverage at a very affordable price. If you can live with the limitations of eero Built-in which I covered earlier, then for AUD$99 the Echo Dot 5th generation is a very budget friendly way to extend your wireless coverage.
DRN would like to thank eero for providing the review unit.
