At its most basic, a great home router acts as a dispersion point. Internet comes in through a central cable line or fiber network to the router, which then beams it out into your home. Its range, the number of devices it can handle, and the speed with which it handles those devices, however, can vary greatly on the age and quality of your equipment. Putting it another way, you can’t buy high-tech devices without also buying a high tech router (at least if you want everything to work the way it should). But when you have two parents, plus plugged-in kids, at home all day, every day, things don’t work like they should. Zoom calls are glitchy, at best. Email is slow to load. Video downloads at a glacial pace. That’s where the eero mesh router comes in. It’s a smart investment as most schools revert back to some form of remote learning. Which means more people, using more devices, at the same time. And that, in turn, means everyone in your home needs faster internet. Some devices require a degree in engineering to set up. Not the eero. It’s literally plug and play. You plug it into your modem. You download the app. The app guides you through set up. It tells you where to place the additional devices so you don’t have dead zones at home. You’re up and running in under 10 minutes. The mesh network covers 5,000 square feet of space. That’s a lot of space. It works when you’re in the yard, which is a bonus for mid-day fatigue or if, like me, you just need a sanity break from your kid for a hot minute. And here’s the absolute bonus for parents: The eero is also a solid parental control device. The app shows you which devices are connected to your network, and who’s using them, in real time. Example: I sent my kid to bed the other night and he snuck his iPad with him, thinking he’d pull a fast one. Not so much. The app showed me that he was online, and he was busted. The app lets parents set schedules, create profiles for kids’ laptops or tablets, or if things really get crazy, shut off the internet so the entire family can reboot. Every product on Fatherly is independently selected by our editors, writers, and experts. If you click a link on our site and buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
