SONOS Compatability with Orbi

I spent a few days evaluating eero. I have finally put it back in the box to return tonight.

The end result is it simply isn't worth the price point for a myriad of reasons. I really wanted to like it. It is the most like old apple products that "just work" out of the box. But for $500 I shouldn't be having sonos issues. I shouldn't be experiencing weird networking outages. Etc. During my testing firmware 2.1 came out and may have fixed these issues. But by that time, I was essentially done.

Google wifi is much cheaper and was showing similar capabilities in the end. On top of that, it seemed to always work. I didn't have a single weird networking thing while using Google Wifi (not with my systems or sonos). It also started producing test results in the speed range I wanted (turns out my internet was partly responsible for that on both eero and google). The only real "flaw" is fewer features than eero. I don't need any of those eero features, but they are not present on google wifi (yet). I am giving this as the gift to my mom. It should work very well for her. I will purchase a second pack for myself if orbi doesn't work out (see below).

I continue to like orbi. I am planning on re-buying the orbi 3-pack to test the new firmware (a minor update was released since I had it) and provide debug logs to netgear. I will purchase it at costco which will let me return things months after I purchase them if they aren't working (by the way, costco is amazing. this is not the first time they have been exceptional for me). I even asked at customer service (some exclusions apply, but they were upfront about it). So I don't have to worry about "netgear won't fix it within my return window". I will run my airport extreme network along side on a different channel so I have stable wifi.

Anyway, that's the result of my experiment in "mesh" networking.

--Derrek