Amazon’s inexpensive Eero mesh Wi-Fi kit is shockingly good

We finally got our hands on Amazon's redesigned second-gen Eero kit, and we won't bury the lede—it's a fantastic performer, especially for the price. Although its performance isn't on par with the Plume Superpods, it was easy to set up and didn't outright fail any of our torture tests. Eero maintained decent browsing latency all around the house, even while simultaneously delivering four emulated 4K video streams.

Don't get us wrong, there's still a lot of daylight between Eero and Plume—but with the Eero kit retailing for $250 normally, and currently on special for $189 with a free Echo Dot and without need for a subscription (for most features), it's a heck of a deal.

On the other hand, if you want Eero because of its Alexa integration... maybe you ought to wait a bit.

Setup is short and sweet

Eero mesh Wi-fi system

The setup process for Eero was gratifyingly quick, especially in comparison to the exhausting procedure Nest Wi-Fi put us through last month. But although it was quick and easy, some of the fancier bits seemed to be broken. In particular, the Eero app wants to offer you placement advice for your units based on a fake floorplan. There are buttons which offer to let you alter that floorplan to match your own—but at least in our testing, it didn't work. We tapped "Shape," "Floors," and, on the next screen, "Edit home layout" until our fingers were raw, but nothing happened.

Luckily, we know this home—and which layouts do and don't work in it—extremely well by now, so we just shrugged, placed our Eeros, and called it a day. The whole thing was over and done with in well under 10 minutes—under five, if you don't count the time spent waiting for Eero units to cold boot when first plugged in.

As always, we'd like to remind everyone that you should label your mesh kit units physically as you set them up, as well as virtually inside the Eero app. You'll eventually be glad that you did.