Amazon has unveiled a new and upgraded version of its Eero mesh Wi-Fi router system, at a much cheaper price than its first model, and offering even easier setup.
The Eero base station is available right now in the US at the time of writing for just $99 / £99 / €99), while a three-pack containing the base station and two beacons for expanded coverage is priced at $249 / £249 / €279. A launch in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK is coming this November.
The new router was unveiled at Amazon’s product launch event at its Seattle, Washington headquarters,
Considering that the first Eero mesh Wi-Fi set cost a whopping $399 (about £300, AU$530), this is a dramatic price cut – and notably, it undercuts the Google Wifithree-pack by $10 in the US at the time of writing.
Wi-Fi enhanced by Alexa – starting with Eero
Like other Eero products before it, these come with dual-band radios as well as Eero’s ‘TrueMesh’ technology, which promises to eliminate dead spots in your Wi-Fi coverage. Better yet, a three-pack can now cover up to 5,000 square feet with Wi-Fi signal, a 66% improvement over the previous model.
Amazon is also introducing two new security services with these new routers, Eero Secure and Eero Secure+, designed to safeguard the devices that connect to your network. The company hasn’t yet revealed the specific features of each service at the time of writing, only that Secure+ offers on-the-go protections and control.
The company was much more excited to talk about how Alexa has been updated to offer voice-based Wi-Fi controls through Eero devices. Here are some of the commands you can expect:
“Alexa, pause the WiFi for dinner.”
“Alexa, turn on the guest WiFi.”
“Alexa, pause the Playstation WiFi.”
Amazon promises to make these Alexa features available to a number of routers from other manufacturers in the future, particularly Asus and TP-Link routers later this year, with support for Arris and Linksys devices coming early next year.
Now that it’s available for less than Google Wifi, Amazon just made Eero a much more interesting proposition for a vast majority of would-be customers, especially given the addition of voice control. Whether this will spark a Wi-Fi war between Amazon and Google is yet to be seen, but we’d be willing to bet on it.
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