David Sparks:

Remember when the Apple Airport was the best home WiFi solution? I sure do. I had a series of terrible routers and finally spent the money on an Airport. The system tools were easy to use and the WiFi was substantially better in my house. But still not perfect.

Last year I started using the Eero Mesh networking routers (Disclosure: they’re an occasional MPU sponsor) and my home WiFi made one of those leaps in technology that makes all nerds so happy. Everything got much better and my family now has stopped pestering me about dodgy WiFi.

Since moving into our new house this past fall, we’ve had some occasional Wi-Fi hiccups. A few times each week, our Wi-Fi just gives up on us. During those moments, we’re still connected to the network, but we aren’t able to transfer any data. This hasn’t compelled me to tear apart our setup quite yet, but it’s getting close.

I’ve been toying with the idea of just purchasing an Eero system with the expectation that it will solve all of our problems. But I already have a Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme, and an AirPort Express. Our house isn’t that large and I feel like I should be able to solve our Wi-Fi issues by repositioning and reconfiguring our existing setup. And of course, I don’t want to spend nearly $400 on a problem that I might be able to fix by investing a little time into it.

But I suppose, if Eero is as good as everyone says it is, it will be a worthy investment.

Update: I spent the afternoon repositioning my AirPort routers, resetting their firmware, and reconfiguring their settings. I moved our Time Capsule to the other side of the office and am now using our AirPort Extreme to extend our network on the other side of the house — instead of the AirPort Express that we were previously using.

It’s only been a day, but our network seems much more stable now. I’m able to get consistent speeds in our master bedroom, which is located on the opposite side of the house from our main base station. This was where most of our dropouts occurred and was especially irritating when we were trying to quickly toggle HomeKit devices or respond to messages before going to sleep for the night.

With any luck, the hour or two I spent on the project will have fixed our problem and I won’t have to spend a bunch of money on new hardware.