It’s robust for a router smartphone app, towing a nice middle line between being so technical it might drive away more novice users and being so basic that it offers no real control. Otherwise, like previous Eero systems, users will find in the Eero app what is probably the most well-designed and intuitive router interface on the market today, with some advanced configuration possible for port forward rules, UPnP toggling, and the option to use a custom primary and secondary DNS, should you prefer to point your network at Google or Cloudflare, rather than Eero’s preferred DNS-although this comes at the expense of Eero Secure and Secure+ features. Eero was unwilling to elaborate on this when asked, which doesn’t bode well for fans of Apple’s HomeKit Secure Router feature. That could be the case again here, but tellingly, Eero’s website explicitly states not only that there are no plans to support the feature, but that the company feels it best to focus engineering efforts on speed and performance. When the Eero 6 update happened in early 2021, those routers were likewise released without HomeKit support, with the company telling reviewers and customers alike they were simply awaiting Apple’s certification to move ahead with support. The Eero Pro 6E feature set is unchanged from past Eero systems, but for one key omission: There is no current plan to support Apple HomeKit. In my own experience, with a mostly-HomeKit-based smart home system, I saw excellent performance, even with the most troublesome pieces of equipment in my network. Excellent 2.4GHz performance and low intra-network latency means that when your smart home gear shows poor response times, it’s less likely to be the network’s fault (though much more goes into this than just low latency). What does this mean in practical terms? It means in the day-to-day, the Eero Pro 6E mesh system is a stable mesh system that costs a bit more than half what the Linksys system charges for performance that, for most people, will be identical, or perhaps even better, than what Linksys’s system offers. I conduct a transfer test six times, then I average the throughput for each tested location. Because of that, I simply don’t bother with internet speed tests at all. Rather than perform internet speed tests, I benchmark with TCP transfer tests using the network testing software iPerf 3, which simulates file transfers and reports throughput, and tells much more about the performance of the network than a simple download test. I tested the Eero Pro 6E with three primary pieces of equipment: a MacBook Air that was hardwired to the Eero Pro 6E via a Plugable 2.5GbE USB-C ethernet adapter, a 2019 Lenovo Yoga with an AX201 card capable of 160MHz channel bandwidth Wi-Fi 6 connections, and a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra that can pull off Wi-Fi 6E with 160MHz channel bandwidth. Like a sleeper car, what it does best isn’t immediately apparent until you look deeper. But that’s only if you’re looking at benchmarks right next to the router. That’s not to say it’s dog slow-far from it-but when you compare it to the unbelievable throughput offered by the Orbi 6E system, it looks kind of shabby by comparison. If you’re going into the Eero Pro 6E expecting to have the doors blown off, you’ll be sorely disappointed. The Pro 6E still functions as a Zigbee hub and, of course, works with Alexa. It’s powered by a leaner 1GHz CPU, too, as opposed to the 1.4GHz CPU of the Eero Pro 6 before it. The Eero Pro 6E is again a tri-band router, but where the previous Eero Pro models featured a second, higher-bandwidth 4×4 MU-MIMO 5GHz band, the 6E features a 2.5GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz band, all of which are 2×2 MU-MIMO.
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