Maketober Day 16: Making a mesh of things with eero

Curse you, Amazon Prime Day. I wasn’t going to buy anything until you came up with a nice discount on a set of three WiFi mesh devices from eero. I’ve been having problems with WiFi reaching all round the house and so I ordered some. The idea is that the three devices work together to extend network coverage around your house. They can forward messages from one to another over the air or via a wired connection.

They do have one major limitation though, which I knew about before I bought them. They don’t do PPPoE authentication. What’s that? I hear you ask. It is part of the process of managing the connection to your network service provider (in our case KCOM and their lovely LightStream fibre). It’s used in lots of places around the world that aren’t America.

In a perfect (but perhaps less secure) world you could connect one socket on an eero node to your network modem and the other onto your local network and have eero look after everything. But because the eero can’t authenticate the connection to your service provider you have to do the next best thing, which is attach the eero to a network port provided by your router. You need to keep the router to do the authentication .This slows things down slightly in that the router is already managing a local network for your house and you are hanging another managed network off that one. However, I’m not interested in the fastest possible network connection. I just want my devices to work all round my house.

I copied the WiFi SSID and password from my KCOM router into the eero and then turned off the WiFi in my KCOM router. This meant that everything around the house has just kept going. The next step will be to put the router into “bridging” mode which turns it into a very simple network connection (rather than the manager of a network that I don’t need). To make this work properly I’ll have to put all the wired devices in the house “downstream” of the eero device which I can’t do at the moment because unlike my router, the eero doesn’t have multiple network ports.

It probably sounds a bit more complicated than it has turned out to be. The good news is that I’ve got much better WiFi around the house. The eero app that you use to manage everything has some very powerful features that let you do things like turn off specific devices and create profiles for combinations of devices. If you’re thinking of getting more WiFi around the place you could take a look at the system. Especially if it is nicely reduced.