Wi-Fi 6 in the new eero Pro 6 can totally keep up with full gigabit internet speeds!

Posted by Paul Braren on Nov 17 2020 (updated on Feb 24 2021) in

Correction, it's important to read what eero says about their built-in speed test:

If you'd like to run a speed test on your client devices (phones, computers, laptops, etc.) to test your network speeds, there are many available resources, including www.speedtest.net. We typically check more than one speed test service, if possible, to ensure that your results are accurate.
Please keep this in mind as you read the article below. In follow-on realworld testing in my home, the actual speeds measured from the speedtest.net app on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are roughly 350 Mbps down and 34 Mbps up.

Article below as it originally appeared.

TLDR

If you have a lot of devices, or rooms where your first generation eero just doesn't quite cut it, the eero Pro 6 is likely to be a good boost for your performance, at the expected cost premium. It's delightful to actually regularly get over 90% of the claimed gigabit speeds (details below), at least in my admittedly unique mesh-less bridge-mode configuration. It's also great to see that each of these always-on devices each sip a mere 7 to 8 watts, even under load!

Since I have gigabit internet speeds, I only plan to test and likely keep the 1000 Mbps eero Pro 6, with no plans to test the 500 Mbps eero 6 or any of eero's Wi-Fi 5 based products including the eero Extender or eero Beacon.

Just because I use a wired backhaul and bridged mode and a separate more customizable router doesn't mean you have to. If your home has gigabit internet speeds, just connect these eero Pro 6 devices the way eero recommends, and use the eero's built-in dns/dhcp/routing for simplicity. I feel comfortable that readers will likely be pleased with their eero Pro 6 purchase.

Shop

Nov 30 2020 update - I pre-ordered my "eero Pro 6 - 3 pack" at full price directly from eero on the day they were announced. Finding these in stock on Amazon as we get close to the 2020 holidays is proving to be a challenge, so I've pulled together a number of reputable sources to increase your odds.

Disclosure: some of these affiliate links may be income-earning for TinkerTry, at no cost to you, with details below every TinkerTry article.

The 3 pack (6,000 sq. ft. coverage) of eero Pro 6 is available for between ~$540 and $599 USD at:

The 2 pack (3,500 sq. ft. coverage) of eero Pro 6 is available for $399 USD at:

Amazon

The 1 pack (2,000 sq. ft. coverage) of eero Pro 6 is available for between ~$206 to $229 USD at:

eero-pro-6-1000 — Click/tap to visit product page, these are the exact model I've TinkerTry'd.

eero-6-500 — Click/tap to visit product page. I won't be testing these since I have a full gigabit internet connection and want/need top speeds.

History

Oct 2013 - I moved to 802.11ac
Jul 2016 - I moved to 3 eero 802.11ac devices, adding a 4th for my basement in 2018.
Nov 2020 - I moved to 3 eero 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) devices, and might still want a 4th for my basement in 2020, we'll see. The original eeros will likely find new roles in relatives' homes and apartments.

MY HOME NETWORK REQUIREMENTS

Blanket all floors

What I wanted most in my Wi-Fi for these past 2 decades is seamless access in my whole home. Let me clarify. With full basements here in New England, that means about 2250 sq. ft. to cover, on 3 floors. A Wi-Fi router upstairs never quite covered the whole home, no matter how many antennas stuck out of it, and performance was quite poor in some corners of our constructed-in-1994 typical wood-frame home, with sheetrock walls and hollow bedroom doors.

Zoom, Zoom, Zoom

for my day job, I frequently move about as often as possible, jumping over to my iPhone to catch a lunch break for example. I don't want to miss a word, and dislike any loss of audio or video quality when moving around, and certainly don't want a dropped Wi-Fi call or Microsoft Teams call either.

Seamless hand-offs

Enter mesh networking. Specifically, the ability for multiple Wi-Fi access points to coordinate with one-another to seamlessly hand-off my device from one to another, much like cell towers do. All using the same SSID, an essential element. You can't have different SSIDs in one home and expect hand-held devices to leap onto the one that's a little stronger automatically, and manually switching is completely untenable.

Prefer 5 GHz

What I also want out of my home's Wi-Fi is the intelligence to do Band Steering, as eero Labs explains:

Many devices are dual-band capable, meaning they support both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. 5 GHz is typically less crowded and offers higher performance. Band steering tracks whether a device has previously been seen on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, and if so attempts to “steer” it to 5 GHz to improve long-term device performance. Band steering does not guarantee that a device will choose the 5 GHz band, but helps to favor that preference.

This is essential to obtain peak speeds, and it must be automatic. Ideally, you move around your home, find your new spot, then once you're relatively still at that location, I want eero to decide to bump me up to 5GHz and stay there if the signal is strong enough.

Wired backhaul/no mesh

With a basement and an attic, running CAT6a network cabling to each eero device was fine, connected to the LAN side of my DOCIS 3.1 Arris CM8200 cable modem with Cox Communications Gigablast internet.

When you don't need to use the dedicated eero-to-eero channel for mesh communications, why do it?

Bridged Mode - sidestepping Amazon/privacy concerns

I realize I'm losing a lot of features that eero offers by not integrating with Amazon services and family filtering, but I choose to continue to use my beloved Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4 for all DNS, DHCP, and routing functions, with forward, reverse, and FQDN support that VMware vSphere requires. I also love the DNS for all Linux and Windows devices, speaking to another automatically by name, and I don't have to memorize IPs. The eeros are just how my iPhones join this same flat home network, really just passthrough devices in my particular unique wiring and software configuration.

ZigBee

I'm not using the ZigBee function of my eero Pro 6.

MY HOME NETWORK SPEED TESTS

WAN - Ookla speed test, eero speed test

The tweet below kind of says it all, doesn't it?

original-eero-vs-eero-pro-6 — You can see pretty clearly I cut-over to the new eero Pro 6 in the evening of November 15. This is the eero's built-in speed testing that automatically or manually runs speed tests of the eero to an internet speed test server, it doesn't test Wi-Fi performance to your Wi-Fi device.

So far, I can safely say that in most rooms I've begun testing the following Wi-Fi 6 devices

iPhone 11 Pro Max (getting turned into Apple in a week)
iPhone 12 Pro Max
the performance of both of these devices has been roughly the same, and the performance of each is roughly 2x as fast compared to when I'm connected to the original eero.

.

The findings here are similar about 2x performance for a given location in my home versus the original eero.

I don't have screenshots or video of WiFi Sweet Spots prepared yet.

MY HOME NETWORK SIGNAL STRENGTH TESTS

I'm planning to simply do this:

remove my basement eero
screenshot Ring Video Doorbell signal strength levels, along with 3 other Ring cameras
swap out my 3 upstairs original eero for my 3 new eero Pro 6
repeat step 2, then publish before and after results in this article

RESULTS

Nov 30 2020 Update - I've now completed these tests using an iPhone 5, an iPhone 7 Plus, an iPhone 11 Pro Max, and an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Even in the worst signal areas of my home, I've now seen that the new eero Pro 6 to be about 2x to 3x faster than my first generation eero from 2016, both using Wi-Fi Sweetspots and using Ookla Speed Test.

While that speed up doesn't necessarily translate to faster page load speeds, it does assure me that my near-gigabit speeds are now enjoyable by Wi-Fi devices nearly everywhere in my home, with far more CPU grunt and bandwidth to handle the fact that I my Wi-Fi device count has grown 4x over those 4+ years.

Videos

Paul Braren - Nov 04 2020 - Unboxing and measuring power use of the new eero Pro 6, more testing of this Wi-Fi 6 coming soon!

Plans

I'll be testing a few devices that gave me minor issues with the first generation eero that I worked around by simply moving to the guest WiFi. These include ecobee thermostats and garaged Tesla Model 3s where only one would join the Guest Wi-Fi network for mysterious reasons (my preferred network for all my IoT devices), but either could join the main Wi-Fi network.

Note, I've been very happy with eero overall, especially their support, the last time I've called them was detailed here back in 2018, admittedly before Amazon acquired them.

Photos

Most devices showed an RSSI closer to zero (stronger signal) on the eero Pro 6, the one exception was likely because the device may have associated itself with another access point.

These images are best displayed as a gallery, just click/tap on any of the images, then arrow/swipe to scroll through them and compare signal strengths.

Nov 18 2020 Update

Based on more testing, article title changed from:

Testing a 3 pack of eero Pro 6 wired to my gigabit internet connection is going especially well with my Wi-Fi 6 devices!

to:

Wi-Fi 6 in the new eero Pro 6 can totally keep up with full gigabit internet speeds!

Nov 30 2020 Update

Results of my most of my testing done so far added to the article above.

Feb 15 2021 Update

Safe to say my speed continues to impress. Granted, this is really a wired ethernet to internet speed test, but it's good to see the eero is up to the task, and these are basically the speeds I get when I'm within 10' in direct line of site of any of my 4 eero access points, which is most of the time.

I've also been able to move both of my family's Tesla Model 3's to my guest WiFi, in the past, only one of them would join the home Wi-Fi for mysterious reasons. The only remaining glitch that I have yet to work out is why sometimes a few or all of my Ring's wireless chimes will start flashing blue indicating they've dropped from Wi-Fi, merely unplugging them and plugging them in gets them going in.

Given how many dozens of wireless IoT devices I have on both my guest and my primary networks, this is hardly a big deal. I've even been able to place a Ring camera in my yard about 50' from my home, and it works just fine.

I'm still very happy with the Ring Pro 6.