I got a bunch for my parents who have a pretty large house in western new york - they are just okay.
I'd recommend a Ubiquity Access Point, Ubiquity Security Gateway, and a Ubiquity Cloud Key instead. You could add one of their managed switches too if you need more network ports.
They work great, aren't that tough to set up and have better performance.
Ubiquiti makes a consumer version which I've been using in my house for about two years (AmpliFi). It's quite good and what I recommend to non-techie friends.
Ubiquiti makes really good stuff–I recently had a great experience setting it up for a 50-person office–but it's not necessarily a replacement for actual mesh wifi since you still need ethernet (and PoE) to hook them up.
My parents house is large, old, allergic to wifi and complicated to wire for ethernet...I set up a mesh network for them last year and it has been a revelation after years of terrible wifi.
I'm pretty sure all the unifi APs support a wireless uplink. They also have "mesh APs". But they do still need the PoE injector if you don't have a PoE switch.
Ah indeed it looks like they enabled multi-hop wireless uplink via a firmware update last summer about a month after I set up my parents house, so I was behind the times on that.
If you want mesh networking without getting into the Amazon ecosystem, there's still Ubiquiti, which most reviewers claim is as good or better than eero for around the same price. Or you could buy an eero right now while they still have inventory of the non-Alexa'd versions.
This is a bad idea, because they could include spyware in future security updates. It's entirely possible for them to backport antifeatures into existing products.
I agree, though I also think it's a bad idea because you're injecting money into Amazon for potentially breaking a good piece of hardware. It might encourage them to acquire products just to reap the benefits of that sweet "Amazon is about to ruin our product - so get a copy now!" sales boost.
I can't imagine such of an effect ever being large enough to factor into any sort of decisionmaking. But there are plenty of hardware-focused companies which make mesh Wi-Fi hardware that are less likely to get swallowed up anyways.
ASUS' AiMesh in particularly neat because it got backported to a bunch of compatible hardware platforms, and rather than being limited to particular "beacons" which tend to be sparse on things like external antennas and Ethernet support, it works with full-fledged Wi-Fi routers.
Users are getting legitimately fatigued of buy outs lowering quality, there are quite a few people I know who will treasure their full metal-chassis thinkpad until the day they die.
And I sort of agree... I'd only expect technically literate people to exhibit this buying motivation, but is the mass market Eero appeal significant enough that their consumer base isn't entirely tech literate people? Apparently this device has done rounds on podcasts but I'd never heard of it before today.
Amazon tends to ungracefully sunset products that don't support their current marketing needs, so it's not going to be like an early gen TiVo that just keeps doing it's thing, I'd assume by the time the acquisition has been announced Amazon already has their fingers all through the firmware.
Yeah, I'm stuck with the same thoughts now. Eero was what I was going to use since they were independent. It's just that Airport is still currently good enough for my needs. There's Ubiquiti but it seems like configuration overkill.
In general? Yes. But it depends on the nature of the startup. VC-backed startups are not more trustworthy at all.
However, there's a rather huge difference in the capacity for harm. If Joe's Tiny Company is just as nasty as the likes of Amazon/Facebook/Google/etc., JTC is still preferable simply because they don't have as much power to abuse.
Startups are even worse - most seem to care only about growth, not even profit, their goal being to hand off the hot potato they built as soon as possible, to whoever gives enough money.
I'd recommend a Ubiquity Access Point, Ubiquity Security Gateway, and a Ubiquity Cloud Key instead. You could add one of their managed switches too if you need more network ports.
They work great, aren't that tough to set up and have better performance.