Amazon have a problem, they sell a ton of devices from Echo to Ring and Fire Tablets and even Fire TV sticks and they all need good WiFi. The problem is that WiFi has in the past often been patchy within people’s homes and so Amazon have purchased eero – a company which revolutionised how WiFi works.
A single WiFi router was fine when there was just the odd laptop, but quickly kids all got a laptop in their bedrooms, more devices such as Virtual Assistants were added along with TV and tablets and WiFi manufacturers tried to solve the issue with range extenders. Older range extenders had two problems – one that they were point to hub solutions, that is each range extender would only talk to a single base station and secondly that often you’d have to manually log on to the range extender with the best signal. This would often leave you connected to a device in a different room with a dodgy signal even though a better was available.
eero solved all of these problems with mesh technology – range extenders (eero call them Beacons) will connect to each other as well as the base station and so WiFi could at last flood an entire house, even the corners where a single range extender couldn’t connect. eero comes with TrueMesh dynamic routing algorithms that ensure there isn’t a home layout or connected device eero hasn’t encountered before.
With the proliferation of smart devices for controlling everything from heating to lighting, cameras to door bells (and not forgetting an Amazon Dash button in the toilet for ordering more Andrex) there has never been a greater need for flooding every corner of house. eero changed the way that WiFi works and now other popular vendors have changed to a similar mesh technology for their WiFi extenders.
It remains to be seen what Amazon do with eero, potentially they could be left alone, rebranded as Fire, or even built into Echo and other devices. Regardless of how Amazon integrate eero, one thing is pretty certain and that is Amazon will use their technology to make Echo and other device connections to WiFi more seamless. Expect to see native support for even more vendor’s Smart devices built into Echo and the initial set up for Echo to become even slicker.
