Your Wi-Fi Sucks And Someone Is Doing Something About It

Nick Weaver had an Internet problem all too familiar to urban dwellers. He installed a Wi-Fi router in his two-bedroom apartment's living room, where he got a reliable 80 megabits per second. In the bedroom only 20 feet away, the signal dropped to 2Mb because the Wi-Fi signal collided with the thick plaster walls. This being San Francisco and Weaver being a 25-year-old engineer from Stanford University, rather than call the phone company he decided to start his own company to solve the problem.

Two years later Weaver is the first customer of that startup, called Eero. His bedroom and living room have little white Eero boxes packed with seven antennas beaming out the newest, fastest flavor of Wi-Fi (802.11ac, if you're curious) on two bands. A glowing LED indicates the box is talking to the others in a so-called mesh network that propagates a strong signal into every corner. Eero's mobile app sets up the network over the cloud, tells you what speeds you're getting and even suggests where to place the other boxes to get better performance. The company suggests one for every 1,000 square feet. As his own guinea pig, Weaver filled his place with signal-hungry connected gadgets--TV set-top boxes, smoke detectors, speakers, phones and game consoles--to replicate, and then some, the average household, which now has more than eight devices on a network, according to research firm IDC. The strain on routers will only worsen as homes add devices and stream more video at higher resolutions. "The only way to overcome physics is to have multiple units to get speed and reliability," says Weaver. "That's how you triple the market overnight--not by selling just one device but by selling three, four or five."

In an indication of just how much latent demand there is for better Wi-Fi, Eero began taking preorders in February and sold 25,000 Eero units for $2.5 million in two weeks--even more impressive considering that an Eero device on preorder costs $125 (a set of three costs $299), twice the price of some off-the-shelf routers from Linksys or Netgear. Those early fans are still waiting for product. Like many hardware startups, Eero has discovered how hard it is to build something complicated that just works. Weaver has delayed shipping his devices three times. The latest snag pushed Eero into February of next year, missing the crucial holiday shopping season. The latest problem was little black spots showing up on the router's plastic shell, caused by a bad batch of resin. Weaver just spent a week outside of Shanghai overseeing the final assembly, where up to a thousand devices are made each day, six days a week. " Facebook's methodology of moving fast and breaking things only works if you're shipping software. You can recover and roll things back. But in hardware everything has a lasting effect. You have to be a lot more diligent and a lot more patient. That's something new for me."

Weaver grew up north of Chicago in the wealthy suburb of Winnetka, where he used to set up his neighbors' Wi-Fi networks. Soon he was doing installs for small businesses around town. He kept it up as a sideline while studying engineering and management science at Stanford, where he met his cofounders, Amos Schallich and Nate Hardison. Weaver tried McKinsey & Co. after graduating but quit for Menlo Ventures. There he did a two-year stint observing one of its portfolio companies, Roku, maker of the streaming-media set-top box, as it defined (and grew quickly along with) a new product category. During that time Weaver kept building custom Wi-Fi networks but was frustrated with the options available. So he decided to just fix it himself. Eero raised $5 million to get started and has now altogether raised $40 million from places like Playground Ventures, a new firm founded by Android creator Andy Rubin, Shasta Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

It seems nuts to take on the $10 billion global Wi-Fi router market, crowded with big brands like Linksys, Netgear and Apple on the high end and dozens of cheapo Chinese manufacturers on the low end. New routers and range extenders come out every year, with the latest standards promising to blast signals farther. Yet even huge players are trying to break in. In August Google announced the OnHub, a cylindrical can with 13 antennas hidden inside. The hardware was built by Chinese routermaker TP-LINK and Taiwanese electronics company Asus, and Google focused on making it dead simple to set up and manage through a smartphone app--similar to what Eero is doing. Google's approach on the hardware side isn't anything new or interesting, Weaver argues. "We're not farming out our products to the same guys who've built the same crappy products for years," he says. "We do everything in-house, because that's really the only way to deliver a fantastic experience."

Eero's use of mesh networking for wireless data is a new twist. Mesh is well established with audio and used by Sonos, a revered maker of wireless speakers, to pipe high-quality sound around a home. Wi-Fi mesh, however, could end up clogging the airwaves and may perform no better than range extenders costing a tenth as much, says Sam Rosen of ABI Research. Eero's tests indicate that its hardware boosts Wi-Fi speeds three to four times over the testers' old equipment, but the big selling point is making the signal more reliable in dead spots.

Other routermakers are keeping an eye on Eero. "Eero is part of the new wave of routers," says Mike Chen, vice president of product management and engineering at Linksys. "Once the industry finds the most optimal way to deliver that promise of extending range, it will be huge for consumers." It's a good problem to solve, says Sandeep Harpalani, senior director of product management at Netgear. "It's actually a more valid problem than what Google is trying to solve--and that's my personal opinion, not Netgear's."

Former Apple engineering executive Jon Rubinstein remembers the July 1999 unveiling of the first iBook laptop with Wi-Fi built in. Fellow Apple executive Phil Schiller jumped off the stage with his iBook to show off its wireless capabilities. "It was a brilliant moment," Rubinstein remembers. Rubinstein, who worked on Apple's routers and sits on the boards of Qualcomm and Amazon, is now working closely with Eero as an advisor. As soon as he heard about Eero, he loved the idea and wanted to get involved: "I think Eero woke some people up."