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So far in life I haven’t needed to be a “mesh boy”. A well-chosen and carefully placed Wi-Fi router worked well in our humble abode, but one particular situation resisted simple solutions until Eero released a device designed for just that purpose in November.
This isn’t going to be an exhaustive survey of the entire Eero ecosystem, but I wanted to let others who may have a similar situation know what works and what doesn’t.
I am privileged to own a cabin in the country of the Pacific Northwest. While the cabin itself is small and open enough that even an ISP-supplied modem-router combo will do the trick, there’s also a barn (now with guest bedrooms, one of which is even insulated) about 300 feet away in light brush. branches. It’s well beyond the range of even a serious multi-antenna router.
We’ve been thinking about connecting the storage to Wi-Fi in some way for years. At first it was fine to have inconsistent internet there (it’s a cabin in the woods!), but now the kids stay there and want to watch bedtime shows or play iPad games away from the adults. Cell coverage in the area has gotten a lot better, but you really want Wi-Fi for these things.
Unfortunately, the landscape and the lack of power anywhere between the two buildings resisted placement. Every solution we came up with was either a pain in the neck or just plain overkill and beyond our technical capabilities. We actually decided that the simplest way to do this was to run 300 feet of Ethernet cable or a harness to power a larger repeater. Eero Outdoor 7 came out.
Outdoor 7’s main goal, as far as I could tell, was to blast your big backyard with Wi-Fi so you could doomscroll in a hammock or treehouse or whatever. It’s basically an airtight, routing node for your Eero network. But what caught my eye in the ad was that you could use two of them as a long-distance bridge. I immediately contacted the company and sent them this diagram (not remotely) to explain what I hoped was possible:
The green one is the main internal thing, the blue ones are the external units. Pretty good, right?
Little did I know that their promo material is basically the same thing, but with a little more detail:
Regardless, I was sent a set to review.
While I’m not a mesh guy, I’ve built a few meshes – you can certainly tell from my tech diagram – but never from Eero. Now I can say that this was the easiest of the bunch by a fair margin. I built the house first with a regular rig, then looked at the instructions for the Outdoor 7.
In general, the guide said, you want it mounted as high as you can reach on the outside wall, with line of sight to the destination junction and no obstructions like bushes or trees in the way. I understood. So I balanced it on an 8×8 I found next to the woodpile, leaning slightly against the (always closed) glass of the back door. Also it looks directly at some debris and a fairly good sized spray of salal and a large tree halfway up. Nailed it!
I didn’t do it out of sheer laziness – well, not entirely. But the way the ground is arranged would actually be a few feet up and if I installed it “properly” using an open air outlet and mounting hardware. So I thought, if these scraps of wood could make it “high” and there was only a pane of glass between it and the open air where it belonged, why did I smash the outside and get wet in the process (it was raining)?
I actually didn’t know it would work. For all I knew, the point was to drive YouTube straight to the rocks. To find out, I first had to go to the warehouse and place his companion.
At least I had the sense to check the range beforehand. With the original ISP router, I got about 100 feet in a straight shot before my phone switched to cellular. After replacing the indoor Eero unit, I got about 150 feet to the middle of the field. As the outer unit was on its small back, I got more or less close to the wall of the shed when it started to fall. But it was forbidden to go inside the door completely.
A socket, fortuitously placed on the outside of the shed, allowed me to mount the second Outer unit as recommended, several feet above and roughly facing the first; I didn’t use a mounting kit and just hung it from a few nails (in case the ground didn’t work), it will probably blow in the wind until I get it right. But the great thing was that even here, out of safe range for my phone’s Wi-Fi signal, I was able to scan the barcode on the bottom of the device, sync it via Bluetooth, and connect it to my home network within minutes. includes it. No login, no 192.168.1.1, nothing.
It was simple enough, I was sure I must have done something wrong. But I went in and indeed the Outer block – despite pointing in the other direction – was pretty much covering the inside of the barn, reaching all the bedrooms with 100+ megabytes. There were a few spotty areas, but nothing serious, so I might add an internal compartment to make it bulletproof.
Obviously, this solution was not cheap. The Eero Pro and two Outdoor guys will run you north of a large house, although I could easily get by with a non-Pro indoor unit or even the latest generation, which would save me a bill or two.
But consider the alternatives: running a cable would mean at least a few hundred dollars to rent trenching equipment (I don’t do 300 feet with a straight shovel) plus networking equipment, plus labor, and it would be pretty DIY. The big repeaters we looked at were also very strict and insisted on proper line of sight – we’d probably have to run Ethernet on both ends of them anyway and buy another router for the warehouse. There are open network nodes like TP-Link, but they are designed to be field transmitters; this was also not an option as no power in the field and internal network signal could reach the storage.
We needed something simple and integrated that could signal a few hundred feet away, and we’ve been frustrated for years that something like that didn’t really exist unless you wanted to be a system administrator or start mowing the lawn. We may have overlooked some options, but the new Eero Outdoor not only fit the bill on paper, it was easier to set up than I expected, even easier than indoor networks I have.
Honestly, I wouldn’t buy it just to cover a field or yard. Do I really need to get another hundred feet of Wi-Fi so I can watch TikTok while brushing?
This looks like hell to me:
However, the fact that two gadgets form a point-to-point bridge has simplified the problem that we have been banging our heads with for years. It seems to me that there are quite a few people out there in a similar situation – if this is you, don’t think twice about it. It will cost you a bundle one way or another; can do it easily.
