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Why I dumped Google for this Amazon device

Amazon Eero wifi device sitting on a wooden floor.
This little device allowed me to finally dump Google. (Image: Yahoo Finance)

Home internet has never been more important than this year.

With millions of Australians working, studying and playing locked down at home for more than three months now, inadequate wifi would have some tearing their hair out.

This was my experience with Google Wifi.

While the white cylindrical pucks look cool, the software administering the network had been frozen for months due to a known issue that Google has refused to fix.

This seems to be a modus operandi for Google, as my house currently doesn't even have a working smoke detector because of this lack of aftercare.

Anyway, the grace period for Google was over, so I jumped at the chance to review the Amazon wifi device when it arrived in Australia this month.

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It's called Eero, and multiple hotspots can be connected together to create one big wifi network – called a "mesh network".

This is especially important for my house, as it is double-storey. A single device just can't go through all the walls and floors by itself.

The installation was simple for both the first device ("the gateway") and the two other supporting devices. Sort of.

The steps were very easy, but each of the devices required a couple of hard resets before they recognised the NBN internet connection. Easy enough to do with the physical reset button.

I installed the Amazon devices in exactly the same locations as the old Google Wifi devices, to get a fair comparison.

I am glad to report that after 3 weeks of usage, the wifi reception strength and the administration software win hands down against Google Wifi.

The software is more intuitive, showing exactly which devices are connected to which Eero. Just the fact the mobile app works is a win against Google.

The fact that each Eero has two bi-directional ethernet ports is very useful too.

That means if you want to hard-wire an internet connection to a heavy-use device like a smart television or a gaming console, there are double the number of ports to use per hotspot.

Google Wifi also had two ports, but they were omni-directional, meaning only one of them could be used for such purposes.

The devices aren't necessarily cheap – a one-pack costs $199 and a three-pack will set you back $429. But in the "new normal" of the post-coronavirus era, many Australians would get their money's worth.

Yahoo Finance has not received any monetary benefit for this article.

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