I’ve bern using Plume for 15 months in my 1.5 floor, 2600sf house. My seven pods replaced three eeros which replaced several iterations of AirPort Extreme/Express extended networks and a variety of ASUS and Netgear wireless routers over the years. I replaced the eeros not because I was unhappy with them (I redeployed them at a friend’s house and just installed eeros gen2 at my neice’s house) but because I wanted to try out the low-power/high density design of Plume.
I currently have seven pods installed. Five are on wired GB Ethernet and two are on MoCA 2.0 bonded connections. I like wired connections because they perform better and make locating the pods less complex because you no longer have to simultaneously trade off the client coverage with the strength of the backhaul connections. I initially did all wireless backhaul and optimizing the layout was frustrating even with excellent assistance from Plume. It’s just a hard optimization problem made tediously slow by needing the optimizer to run before benchmarking changes.
As Jim and Tim can testify, comprehensive testing of real world networks is not easy nor is it simple to conclude one configuration is “better” than another. I’m much less ambitious and capable than either of them and confined my testing to a single client running iperf3 against a wired 2012 Mac Mini. The client was either my iPad Pro 12.9” (Gen 1) or my iPhone (originally a 7, now an 8). Occasionally, I’d test with a 2014 15” MacBook Pro. I have about 40 devices connected to the network including a TiVo, multiple Apple TVs, a half dozen iPhone/iPads, five Wyze cameras, and a bunch of IoT devices. My current Internet connection is 300/15 Comcast service with a XR6 configured as a modem/router. The pods are in bridge mode. My network has 7 switches and three MoCA adapters. It’s bigger and more complicated than average but not crazy land. I spent 20 years in corporate IT support jobs with the majority of that installing and supporting infrastructure so it’s not my first rodeo.
I wanted to give you all that background to provide come context to my experience and conclusions. I’ll start by saying that I’ve never been happier with my WiFi network than I am right now. I wouldn’t say it ever was bad before but it seemed like there were always nagging problems with poor coverage in spots, access points that needed to be rebooted, unexplicable slowdowns/disconnects, and roaming issues. Some of that was due to the state of the tech as 802.11ac on today’s hardware is so much better and faster than 802.11b on the initial Apple Airport back in 1999 but I prefer the Plumes to both the eeros and the AirPort Extreme. I’m able to place the eeros close to where I want the the best coverage and move them around if my needs change. They roam relatively quickly because the low power makes it more likely that the signal strength will drop enough to trigger the client to roam when I move from one part of the house to another. The app is good although I wish it provided more information about the network that the optimizer sees and provided better presentation of information it does have. I’d rate it as better than eero, AirPort, or xFi.
Max performance is around 350Mbps depending on the distance to the pod, the client tested, and factors that I don’t understand or control. I just ran an iperf3 (500MB, 1 sec intervals) from my iPad Pro and got 349-373Mbps. Thanks to wired backhaul, I get that in every room in my house. I’ve done some testing with wireless backhaul and throughput drops roughly in half. That said, the actual day-to-day experience at 150Mbps on our iDevices with our usage is indistinguishable from 350. More importantly, the actual experience everywhere in the house is identical. Almost all the heavy lifting in my house is on PCs and Macs that are either permanently hardwired or can be jacked in when needed. That may not be your situation.
So why did I choose eero over Plume for my niece? First, her husband doesn’t like the look of anything plugged into wall outlets so a few power cords were preferred to lots of pods (big house). More importantly from my POV, the current generation of pods have to be used in bridge mode in any moderately complex world. Since a pod only has one port, if you use it as a router, all your wired equipment ends up with a wireless hop to the Internet which I consider completely unacceptable. That means either adding the compexity of an additional router or living with the crappy router in the Comcast box. eero doesn’t suffer from that limitation so it’s easier to install and support. That changes with the SuperPod which I’m switching to at my house so I can switch my XR6 into bridge mode (although the XR6 is less crappy a router than the Arris it recently replaced at my house). If the SuperPod has existed six months ago (and is good), I wouldn’t have offered up the eero as an option.
The only real pain point for me is that I’d like the ability to have separate SSIDs for 2.4 and 5. Partly because I’d like devices capable of using 5 to only use 5 and partly because IoT support whines uncontrollably about not having a distinct 2.4 network when I call with a problem. It’s never an actual problem; their scripts and training just don’t account for it.
The $200 lifetime/$60/year “membership” leaves me puzzled because I don’t see it as much of a revenue boost for Plume given the deep hardware discount and the relatively cheap lifetime option. In return, they are getting a bunch of grief from people that don’t like anything that looks like a subscription. My personal view is that my financial life is full of regular payments of all kinds so I don’t really care. Magazines, newspapers, charitables, utilities, insurance, software subscriptions or upgrades, lease payments, yada, yada, yada. All I care is if it solves a problem for me at a fair price. I’m not going to switch to the $60/year from my grandfathered lifetime but only because the benefit is just extended warranties and that’s not worth $60 to me. On the other hand, if they wanted to provide Wi-Fi for my house as a service for a few hundred a year, I might bite on that. It’s very liberating to be make these kinds of things somebody else’s problem (I believe in city water, power, waste collection, and sewer as well). Maybe it’s holdover from the days when people thought it was my problem to fix so I had paid for contracts with companies like Cisco and DEC to fix their stuff when things went wrong.
I understand there are people that don’t see it that way just as I understand there are people that don’t want any cloud dependencies. I’m just not one of them. It’s like when friends that tell me their photos and videos are the most important thing in the world and they would just die if they lost them but then refuse to pay a $5/month for offsite backup. It’s a real head scratcher for me.
