Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am not one for writing reviews as of late, but I feel that this is a must for those of you like myself just getting into mesh systems and wanting the best of the best or least wanting something worth the money. Let me start of by saying that this is my first mesh system. I returned it one week after owning it. Why you ask? Because it went on sale for $200 cheaper a week later after I purchased this past August 2022, so I returned it and immediately purchased the exact same setup for the sale price. Now that that is out of the way, lets get into the brass tax. I have over 100 smart devices, bulbs, led strips, switches, plugs, tvs, way too many gaming systems, tablets, phones, blinds, fans, garage door, sprinkler, speakers, 10 variations of Echos, computer pcs and macs, in my 1 story attached garage 2000 sq ft home of concrete stucco hurricane code. I purchased the 3 pk this past August of 2022. Now is it overkill? Maybe. Prior to this I purchased several WIFI range extenders just so I could reach my outside landscape smart bulbs, and my driveway smart lights and my smart sprinkler Rachio. Needless to say that was a fail, the price of those extenders were fairly cheap and that was the definition of you get what you pay for. I was barely getting 15 down and 1 up with those extenders by my smart sprinkler panel that is attached to the outside of my home. I decided to take a dive into EERO and go all out and get the PRO 6e. The first couple of days I was getting speeds of 500 down and 40 up. Then things started to get a little crazy. Mind you I set them up at the farthest corners of the house and have one in the garage as well. As the week went on devices started slowly disconnecting and wouldn't work. Lifx anything was totally useless, and so were the nanoleaf panels. Shortly room by room the wiz bulbs started to not work and then eventually the govee anything and Roombas as well as sonos speakers. Everything started to not connect to the network. I have one EERO set up next to the modem/router combo from Xfinity in the center of my 2000 sq ft home serving as the gateway and each of the other two are over 500 feet away. At this point and you might be thinking to yourself that is one expensive failing range extending system. At least that is what I was thinking. SO I called Amazon customer support and I was transferred to an EERO tech who got me through the process of hard resetting each EERO and only having one connected. He advised me that having more than one in my 2000 sq ft home was overkill and I was clogging up the highway of bandwidth. So shortly after I got off the phone with tech support, I was thinking to myself....wait what? If that were true then why were all my devices working flawlessly in the beginning when I first set them up a week ago? So I connected the other two and boom all my devices were lightning fast no lag no hesitation. This time almost 600 up on my phone and almost 700 on my PC. Wirelessly I might add. A week goes by and then it starts happening again, I went through the entire reset process disconnected every device reconnected everything and things are back running smoothly. At least I thought. So digging through the web and further investigating I decided to go into bridge mode. Based on EEROS software and program design, they are set up to optimize your entire home network every so often, in my case it was one week. However their optimization program in router mode is counterintuitive in my case. This is why all the clients/devices were having connectivity issues. Now here is where the fun begins because I was going to send these back, because my 11 year old Netgear gaming router was out performing this system...until I bridged it. Wow, PC speed is almost at 900 down, and the PC is far away from the mesh systems, phone speeds at about 800. And every single device has not disconnected or dropped and works beyond my expectations. Outside of my house I live on a 10000 sq ft lot and I can go anywhere in my yard and I have signal. Not to mention these things are fighting through concrete stucco and probably more traffic then i35 and i10 combined during construction. Overall 4/5 due to the so called router optimization software they use and the fact that they would have you pay for a sub, which reminds me I need to cancel since their subscription services do not work in bridge mode. If you are too lazy to read all that here is a short list of pros and cons. Pros: Super fast speeds, easy to set up, app is easy, sleek futuristic clean minimal design Cons: Price, takes quite some tinkering on user end to optimize setup, subscription based services Special notes: 1 EERO serving as the gate in bridge mode directly connected to the router/modem from Xfinity. My EERO serving as gateway has an outgoing powered network switch attached to it. I have 1.2 GBps with Xfinity, just with the one EERO Pro 6e wired I an getting above 1.4GBps super fast If you are not savvy with nerdy geeky stuff, hire a pro to optimize your network. These are worth it and I would recommend even without the sale price. Invest into a firewall router if going into bridge mode.