Eero surprise

I just had a surprising discovery about my Eero.  I made a mistake!

On Thursday evening, I installed it in my home.  First, I attached it to my cablemodem, as instructed by the iPhone app, then I attached two more units to my network in other parts of my home.  Everything has been working well since.

I remembered a day or two ago thinking about that main Eero unit.  I didn’t seem to remember attaching it to my primary ethernet switch.  But I must have, right?  It’s been working fine.

Tonight, I was in the living room where the main Eero is, and I looked at it, only to find that it had a single ethernet cable attached, which runs to my cablemodem.  It was not physically connected to my network at all!

As it turned out, at least one of the other Eero units has been connected back to the main Eero using the wifi mesh.  And my network has been working very well.  We’ve been streaming Netflix, stream shows on the AppleTV from the cloud, playing an MMO game, etc.

So, congratulations Eero – the fact that my entire network was connected to the Internet across your wifi mesh, and I didn’t notice… Well, that’s great!

I did correct this issue this evening by adding a cable from the main Eero to my primary ethernet switch.  I understand that some lag was introduced in an MMO game for about 20 seconds or so when I attached it, but it seemed to adjust to the network topology change and keep right on going.