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Comment by weaves | Hacker News Reader

@kalessin Nick the Co-founder and CEO of eero here. You're totally correct about 5 GHz - it doesn't get through walls particularly well. That's where having a distributed mesh versus one router is really helpful. By placing a few of our units through your home we're typically able to have 5GHz links between our devices and 5 GHz links out to clients.

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Does each unit have 2 radios (e.g. 2x 5ghz radios)? Trunking and communicating with clients with one radio would give you less than half of the normal bandwidth, which is why lots of wireless meshes trunk on a different frequency (though I'd prefer the option of trunking via Ethernet). Unless wifi chipsets have become very clever in the past few years, it seems like this wouldn't allow max throughout.

Yes, we have 2 x 5 GHz. You can also use the gigabit ports as well.

The spec sheet claims "Dual WiFi radios" as well as "Simultaneous 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless". This tells me you're probably using a pair of dual-mode 2.4GHz/5GHz radios if you can act in dual-5GHz mode.

Assuming this radio setup:

Do you dedicate one of the radios to the mesh communication?

If so, does this mean you have a non-simultaneous dual-band 2.4/5 on the other radio for client devices?

Do you intelligently switch the mesh radio between 2.4GHz and 5GHz on a per-access point basis based on what gives the best ratio of packet loss to bandwidth to the surrounding mesh nodes?

How many antennas do you have per radio/band?

That's good to know. I don't feel like my original question was answered though: why the Eero repeater would get a better signal than another good WiFi solution at the same location? How do you get a strong signal to repeat from?

Any plans to power the device over Ethernet (PoE) for those with existing network infrastructure?

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