Screenshots by Ry Crist/CNET The setup process The Eero 6 setup process could not be any easier. I bemoaned the lack of extra, Alexa-specific features with last year's Eero, so all of that is a nice, user-friendly step in the right direction - though Amazon still hasn't gone as far as Google, which built fully functional Google Assistant smart speakers into each Nest Wifi satellite.

You can also enable Thread, an additional Wi-Fi protocol that lets you connect with certain kinds of smart home devices. You'll need to connect the router to an Amazon account in order to put it to work, but once you do, you'll unlock nice, common sense features like Device Name Sharing, where your custom names for network devices in the Alexa app automatically port over to the Eero app. That lets you connect things like smart locks and smart lights with Alexa without need for an additional Zigbee hub. That's good, but you can find better - for instance, though it doesn't feature Wi-Fi 6, last year's Nest Wifi supports 3x3 connections.Īlong with Wi-Fi 6 support, the Eero 6 router also includes its own Zigbee radio. It also supports 2x2 MU-MIMO connections, which lets it use two antennas to split its attention to two separate devices at a time, or aggregate the signal from those antennas to a single device with multiple antennas of its own. Inside, the Eero 6 router runs on a 1.2GHz quad-core processor with 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage. Plus, you can only connect to one band at a time. Just keep in mind that those speeds come from lab-based tests that don't take things like obstructions, distance and interference into account, so your actual speeds will be a lot lower. Screenshots by Ry Crist/CNETĪs for the specs, the Eero 6 router is an AX1800 device - the 'AX' denotes support for 802.11ax, or Wi-Fi 6, while the '1800' tells you the combined top speeds of each band. The Eero 6 features a built-in Zigbee radio that Alexa can use to pair with things like smart locks and smart lights.

It also means that you can't wire the range extenders back to the router for faster performance. That's not ideal if you're like me and living with a handful of streaming devices, gaming consoles, smart home hubs and the like, all of which work best with, or require, a wired connection to the router. That means that you only get a single spare Ethernet jack that you can use for hardwired connections to the router. The other Eero devices are range-extending satellites, and they don't include Ethernet jacks at all. The devices inside look identical, but they aren't - one is designed to serve as the main router, and along with the USB-C power port, it includes two gigabit Ethernet jacks, one of which you'll wire to your modem. Ry Crist/CNET Design and specsĪrriving in a tidy, rectangular box, the Eero 6 three-pack makes a decent first impression. The Eero 6 range extender (right) doesn't include Ethernet jacks at all. The Eero 6 router (left) includes two gigabit Ethernet jacks, one of which you'll wire to your modem. That's a key feature if you want a mesh router that gets the most out of Wi-Fi 6 - and the dual-band Eero 6 doesn't have it. And note that all three of those alternatives are tri-band routers that include the usual 2.4 and 5GHz bands, plus a second 5GHz band dedicated to moving data between the router and its satellites. If you're paying for internet speeds any faster than that, then you'll want a mesh router that's designed to take advantage of them, like the Netgear Orbi AX6000 ($700 for a two-pack), the Asus ZenWiFi AX ($450 for a two-pack), or Amazon's own upgrade model, the Eero Pro 6 ($600 for a three-pack). For starters, though Amazon now says Eero 6 can hit top speeds of up to 900 Mbps, those top speeds are limited enough that Amazon initially recommended it for homes with internet connections of up to 500Mbps, well beneath what Wi-Fi 6 is capable of.

Mesh networking and Wi-Fi 6 can indeed make for a pretty killer combination, but Eero 6 comes with some caveats.

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