The Vergecast - Eero CEO Nick Weaver on 5G, Thread, and the future of the smart home
Episode Date: November 23, 2021Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn interview CEO of Eero Nick Weaver live at On The Verge in New York City. The discussion includes how the Ring Alarm Pro came together, Eero supporting Thread and Matter, in...tegration of 5G, and what's next for the smart home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Support for the show comes from Retool.
Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,
Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.
Not because they want to, but because building internal tools
means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.
That's where Retool comes in.
Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.
Prompt something like,
build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.
And Retool actually builds it on your company's data,
in your cloud with enterprise security built in.
Go to retool.com slash Verchcast.
We all need to retool how we build software.
What's up, y'all.
I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star,
Olympic gold medalist, and mom.
And I'm Cassidy Hubbard,
host and reporter for nearly 20 years,
covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.
And this is Am Mom,
a community for athletes, game changers,
and moms of all kinds.
dropping May 14th.
Tap in with us.
Greetings, mobile accomplishers.
Welcome to the Vergecast.
My name is Dieter Bone,
and you are listening to our special series
of topic-specific Tuesday episodes.
This week, the topic is ERO,
and that's because we are bringing you
an interview that Nealai Patel and I did
with the CEO of ERO, Nick Weaver.
We held this interview back at our 10-year anniversary
party conference festival thing
called On the Verge in New York City.
It was a ton of fun.
It was a huge blast.
So we're happy to bring some of the things that happened at this event to you if you couldn't make it out to the party.
But if you could, thanks so much for coming.
It was great to see you.
Anyway, with this interview with Nick, I want you to pay special attention to the pieces where we begin to talk about thread and matter.
So thread, if you're not familiar with it, is a kind of radio for smart home devices that ERO in particular, but a lot of people in general have been hyping for several years now, but never seems to amount anything.
But it seems like it's actually about to become super important.
And it's about to become super important because there is another smart home standard called Matter,
which is the standard that used to be known as connected home over IP, or you could have called it the chip,
or yeah, you could call it choip if you wanted to be a weirdo like me.
Anyway, it's the standard that's supposed to make smart home gadgets all talk to each other.
And ERO's whole jam is connecting things in your home.
They make Wi-Fi routers, and they also now make a version of ERO that connects up to a ring pro
and can actually provide backup internet over LTE for when your internet.
goes down. So we discuss all of these things. But the reason I'm bringing up matter and thread
in particular is because in a couple of weeks after we get through the holiday break, we're going to
bring you one last topic-specific episode on Tuesday that will be all about matter. We're going
to get to the bottom of whether or not the hype is real and what's going on with it. But in the
meantime, there's a lot of really interesting things here with Nick, and so I hope you enjoy.
I like this foreboding distance that we have. I know. You got both of you over there.
What's going to happen to Nick?
You tell me.
There's actually a bucket of water, you know, just if you answer the slime machine?
Yeah, yeah, perfect.
So I actually want to start with the new product that you made, Amazon made, Ring made.
There's a ring alarm pro, and if you're not familiar, one of the cool things about it is it has ERO built in.
And how did that happen?
Did you make it?
Did they call you and ask you?
Like, what happened there?
Well, we really just started with what are the problems that people are trying to solve in their home?
And when you have a camera, Wi-Fi is really important.
So the whole premise there was how can we make things as easy as possible for customers,
make it easy to set up, make sure you've got super reliable Wi-Fi,
so your cameras stay connected, and integrate it all into one device.
So it makes perfect sense to put Wi-Fi into a device like ring.
But again, did they ask you?
Are you all in the room all the time?
Are you all just one big company now or phone call?
How does that work?
Phone call, meeting.
We all know how to reach each other.
Yeah, okay.
And just a lot of it starts with thinking about what problems we're hearing from customers
and deciding if we want to go work on a solution together or independently.
Yeah.
There's a lot of flexibility.
Well, I mean, I look at all the smart home gadgets now in my house, and I think, well, that should have Wi-Fi.
That should be a router. That should be a router.
Like, why ring and nod and Echo?
I think there, with Echo devices, you've got them everywhere in the house.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of places where you want a voice assistant that doesn't necessarily have the best Wi-Fi
coverage. There's a lot of places where you need great Wi-Fi coverage. It's not a great place for
a voice assistant. So, you know, for instance, there's a lot of routers in people's closets. That's
where the internet comes in, not a good place for a voice assistant. So a lot of the thinking is,
hey, where can we converge devices where it makes sense for customers and putting it into a,
you know, fully comprehensive alarm base station makes a lot of sense. Yeah, but like an echo in your
kitchen is a great place for a router. It could be. Will it be?
You know, we've looked at everything, and, you know, in the future, who knows?
It might make sense to converge more of those devices than we have in the past.
The other genius thing about the Ring Alarm Pro is that it has a backup LTE modem.
So if your internet goes out, you can have a backup internet, I forget exactly how much you get over LTE for a little while so that you're not just knocked offline.
Why LTE and not 5G?
When we're looking at what's required for an alarm system, LTE provides just enough connectivity that you need.
This is not really supposed to be your high-speed primary internet connection.
We want you to be able to stay online.
And then with 5G still evolving, and depending on what flavor of 5G, sometimes it doesn't get through walls particularly well.
And so that was one of the considerations that went into that product decision specifically.
But there are some flavors of 5G that, like, millimeter wave doesn't go through walls.
But also, like, I don't think a lot of people are setting up ring camera systems under, like, one streetlight in New York City.
It's just like you holding your floodlight cam.
I get the just enough argument.
But there's another argument that you would want to fail over to 5G when you're near it goes down, and that would be really fast.
There are the home internet services from their providers.
Is that, do you see that as a viable path?
I think when we look at the performance and reliability
of ERO networks just across the US, across the globe,
there is a subset of customers where failover could
and would be really valuable.
So it's certainly something we've been exploring.
A lot of it comes down to the amount of data
you're going to use, cellular is fairly expensive.
And in particular with 5G, it's super fast speeds.
You can consume a lot of data really quickly.
and the cost per gigabyte is still fairly high.
Okay, so if we're talking about 5G,
I think our audience knows that 5G is a race,
and we're winning, we've lost.
Do you feel like you're in a race with 5G?
Because the claim has been, well,
we're not going to need Wi-Fi anymore.
Everything's going to have 5G, it'll be great.
Yeah, I think 5G and Wi-Fi are really great,
complementary technologies.
Okay.
Cost of cellular is really expensive.
Cost of 5G is very expensive.
We're talking not one, but,
frequently two orders of magnitude more in terms of putting a Wi-Fi chipset into a device
versus a 5G modem.
And so 5G is great for coming into the home, but for getting it to all the devices around
your house, paying that cost on a per device basis just doesn't make sense.
You also, you miss out on having your own local network.
That's one of the great things about running your own network.
You get a firewall.
You can set rules.
You can keep your devices safe and secure,
and you lose a lot of that control and capability
if it's all connecting directly to a cellular network.
Right. So you don't feel any competition at all from 5G?
I think, again, it's a really great complementary technology.
Is anyone feeling anything at all from 5G?
Yeah, I mean, there's that.
I mean, that's kind of the big question is,
yep, I get it.
You need a fast connection to your house,
they need to redistribute it to all the things your house.
Are you seeing a higher attach rate of, like, T-Mobile at home,
5G or Verizon as a fixed service in Texas, are you seeing those numbers tick up versus straight
cable? I think the biggest trend we are seeing is just people are upgrading to gigabit in droves.
They want gigabit. They want faster than gigabit. A lot of people are sitting at home doing
everything, school, work, entertainment, and they just want more speed, more bandwidth to do all
the things they need to do from home. So we've just seen really, really, you know,
significant adoption of gigabit internet, and that trend is not slowing down.
Here's a weird one. I have gigabit internet, and it sucks.
We're going to fix Dieter's network right here, right now.
My download speeds are okay, my upload speeds are garbage,
and that's very common in the US, especially with cable.
When you're designing routers, are you designing for an idealized world
where we all have actually good internet from good companies,
or are you designing it with the realities of what you think customers are actually going to be able to do?
do. When we're designing our products, it's being designed independent of your internet connection.
We are just trying to make our radios, our RF performance as high quality as we possibly can.
We want it to be as reliable as it can, and we want to hit the highest bandwidth metrics
that's possible with that design. And so if you hook it up to a symmetric gigabit connection,
Great. If you hook it up to a gigabit connection with 10 megabits up, you know, you're not going to see great upload speeds because you're limited by the pipe coming into your home. But the ERO network is going to perform as well as we possibly can make it.
Right. With Gigabit, one of the, right, you need Wi-Fi 6 to really take advantage of Gigabit. Now there's 6E. It's great. The names are great. We're very proud of the whole industry constantly.
It's improving. That's a low floor.
We've noticed the Wi-Fi 6 products are still wildly expensive.
It's been like a year and a half, maybe more.
There's just a cost penalty for this stuff.
Is that because there's not enough?
They haven't hit scale.
Why that cost penalty?
It's just a transition.
And everybody has been hearing about this for months and months and months.
The supply chain is also backed up and things are a lot more expensive.
Chips are more expensive.
labor is more expensive, shipping is more expensive.
Is there like a cargo ship that's just like full of euros just like floating around the ocean right now?
There's probably a few of them at this point.
Is that something that you pay attention to as a CEO?
Do you get a report that's like we actually can't, we're waiting for a container to unload with product?
I have spent more time on the phone with our head of manufacturing operations in the last year and a half
that I think we had in the last three years or four years.
before that. It is consumed a lot of time and energy and, you know, our teams have been just
just working around the clock. You know, you fix one problem, another one pops up. It's a huge,
huge game of whackamol. And in particular, getting product to customers, like, that is something,
yeah, I'm really involved in. So that actually surprises me because I would assume, if you guys don't
know, Dero was bought by Amazon, that you've got Amazon who's pretty good at logistics. I would
think that you could let them handle that. So, like, what is Amazon?
doing in terms of, you know, working with customers.
I'm sure they're handling a bunch of HR and corporate stuff for you.
But like, what's your relationship with Amazon?
Like, there's a ring over there.
You worked with them.
But what do they do?
What do you still like, no, this is mine.
I will always control this part of the business.
Yeah.
So we handle, you know, all the product development, support,
and we've got our own dedicated teams for nearly every function that runs the company.
In terms of how do we leverage the greater Amazon?
Well, there, a lot of its relationships, Pacity, thinking of,
about long-term inventory and really being able to make sure
we have enough stock for customers,
that's been places where we've leveraged the greater team a lot.
Then there's also strategic planning.
What sub-suppliers can we work with together
and really aggregate the demand of radios or memory
or other parts of the supply chain?
So we get better scale, better support,
and can deliver.
just better products for customers. So we've done a lot of that. But yeah, Amazon's very much
about single-threaded ownership, and that's my responsibility at ERO's. Keep driving the company,
keep driving the product portfolio, keep building great devices for customers.
Do you ever get on the phone with like the Prime Video team? And you're like, dude, Ted Lasso is just
like constantly using an iPhone. Can we get the boys some Eero routers? Like, they need Wi-Fi?
conversation yet, but you know.
You should.
That's my only suggestion.
Okay.
We're going to have more about thread, but that's my real long.
It's coming, yeah.
I guess those are you talking about getting stuff out to customers.
You have people who we don't know.
You don't just sell to, like, consumers on Amazon.
You've got like an ISP business.
You're partnering with actual internet service providers.
How's that going?
Yeah, that's been a huge part of our business.
So over the last year, our ERO networks that get deployed by our ISP customers
have increased over 75%.
And that's just because,
customers want faster speeds when they get faster speeds they want faster Wi-Fi
and they want coverage everywhere so we've announced deals with Talk Talk in the
UK media com here in New York and it's been really exciting taking you know
really great internet connectivity plans bundling them with Eros and then
delivering this like great internet experience to customers like that is what we
are trying to do each and every day we want the internet in people's homes to
just work. And working really closely with internet service providers is a really big part of
our business. Is that going to be a bigger part of your business than selling direct to consumers?
You know, over time, we'll see. You know, we sell a lot of EROs on, you know, with retail partners
like Best Buy, Costco. It's good. You mentioned the other ones before we were like in Amazon.
On Amazon.com. Hulking goliath in the corner. We also sell it onero.com.
Actually, when you think about, like, where is it growing?
We are going to talk about thread and smart home.
It's coming.
But when you, we've made you wait for the punishment.
But when you think about, okay, my cable company is going to put an euro in my house.
Cable companies have historically weird ideas about configuration and stuff like that.
When you start to add the capabilities, are they getting in your way?
Will they get in my way?
Like, I want to turn on thread or I want to use some of the Eero features that you've deployed.
Are they leaving that stuff alone?
Do you have to talk to them or do you have to negotiate?
Like the classic example I would use is cell phones and carriers.
Yep.
We have an entire exhibit to a cell phone that was destroyed by carriers
that Dieter made a documentary about.
Like, is that something that's happening to you too?
So ERO devices across the globe,
regardless of where they were bought or where they're coming from,
I'll run the exact same software.
They all talk to the same app.
You have the same controls.
So for customers, if you get,
your ERO from your local ISP or you buy it from ERO.com, you're going to have the same experience.
And you're committed to that. You're never going to white label it. You're never going to let
ISP mess with it. We think really tight integration between hardware, software, and delivering that
same experience works really well for customers. And that's how we've built the company, built the
business, and we're going to continue to do that. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. But when we
come back, we're going to have a little bit more from the CEO of Eero, Nick Weaver.
Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website
builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time
collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention
advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered
to build and maximize your dot-com from day one.
Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com.
Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible.
Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan.
That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off.
Framer.com slash verge.
Rules and restrictions may apply.
Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.
If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts,
but time and resources are limited.
Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates
takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.
That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.
It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.
That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job.
Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates
and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.
Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language.
Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week.
With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent.
And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward.
Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire.
Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track.
Terms and conditions apply.
Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.
If you're a small business owner, you need to be a lot of your business owner, you need to be a track.
know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with,
and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.
That's where LinkedIn HiringPro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner,
helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without
turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job
to shortlisting candidates
and conducting AI-powered interviews
for initial screenings.
Its updated conversational interface
lets you describe what you need
in plain language.
Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate
to interview within a week.
With Hiring Pro, you spend less time
searching and more time connecting
with the right talent.
And instead of getting buried in resumes,
you get a focused shortlist
that actually moves your hiring forward.
Join the 2.7 million
small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at
LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from
Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking
usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet
meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off
and figure out where the deeper issue lies.
That's where Claude can help.
Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.
It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you,
whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move.
Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.
Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search.
It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis,
with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes.
Ready to tackle bigger problems?
Get started with Claude today at cloud.
org slash vergecast.
That's clod.aI slash vergecast
and check out Claude Pro,
which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode.
Claude.aI. slash vergecast.
All right, we're back with more of our interview
from the On the Verge event with CEO of Ero, Nick Weaver.
Okay, so I promise we'll
we're going to fix a smart home and it was not going to be confusing anymore.
But before we do, I want you to pull out your phone.
Sure.
And we're going to look at our Eero networks, Neil, you too.
Oh, boy.
And we are all going to find the most embarrassing thing currently connected to our smart home
and we're going to cop to it and explain why we have it.
So this is really good radio.
You're watching a scroll on our phones here.
I knew this is coming, so I'll just tell you.
The most embarrassing thing on my network is Lisa, that's my spouse, mega.
I don't know what mega means.
Smart plug, question mark, question mark.
I don't know what it is, neither does she, but we are too afraid to turn it off because we think it controls something important.
That's good.
Yeah, it's a 2.4, and it's made by a company called Espressive.
That's got a, yeah.
That's just spyware, dog.
I don't know what you're doing.
So maybe someone's spying on me, yeah.
What do you got?
Mine is extremely dumb.
It is also a plug.
Okay.
I know what it does.
It turns the subwifor in our living room off.
because often when we are verge casting,
my daughter, Max, is watching Paw Patrol,
and there are at least two episodes of our show
where you can hear the thump of the Paw Patrol theme song
like coming from right above us.
So I put the sub-of-or on a plug
and I turn it off before we podcast.
And I don't know why I turn it back on.
It's because she's not like, I don't know,
the base response to the show.
But I don't want to turn it back.
I think for me it's just like the long list of devices in the home category.
We have air quality sensors, we have air purifiers because we're in Northern California.
I have ceiling fans.
I have the ceiling fan controller.
We have an oven.
And then we have a bunch of hubs I've been trying out to see if they do anything.
It's been a, it's been a very long project.
Do you have a home kit bridge?
I do have a Hoob's box.
Yeah, we've got three of them, three of them on stage.
I feel like, but it's, we're like, you know, we're outside the system.
You admitting that you have a Hoob's box, it's like, all right, it's taking over.
I've been experimenting.
It's, it's an interesting experience.
Very hard to configure.
If you don't know, Hoob's is a thing you can buy, but the actual software is called HomeBridge,
and it is, it just bridges everything into HomeKit.
So, like, your ring camera show up in HomeKit.
But Deeter and I have very different experiences with it.
I'm like, it's great.
And Dieter's like, why did you make me do this?
You're a horrible monster to bad friends.
I think it's great.
But we've heard lots of Apple engineers have this thing running.
And to me, that brings us right to where we're going, which is that is, it's crazy that like a bunch of Europeans like ship everybody raspberry pies to make their smart homes work.
But that is the current state of things.
You're working on fixing it.
How's it going?
Well, you know, our whole thesis at Euro, you know, our whole thesis at Euro, you know,
why we started the company.
Everything in our homes is going to be connected to the internet.
And ultimately, our homes are going to run on a computer.
And so our vision has always been, you need to have a network to enable that.
And that computer and that network are probably going to converge into the same thing.
But there's a first really important step.
And that is having super fast, reliable connectivity everywhere.
Today, that's primarily Wi-Fi.
Over time, it's going to continue to be, you know,
You need low power, you need long range.
There's a bunch of different flavors of connectivity that this home of the future needs,
and actually the home of today needs too, to get all these devices connected.
And once they're connected, and it's as reliable as our running water and our power,
then you can start layering on control, intelligence, and, you know, all the other things
that we are trying to make happen today.
So there's two big things happening.
One, there's this industry group called Matter,
which is Apple, Google, Amazon.
Formerly Chip.
Formerly Choip.
My t-shirt that says We Matter
raises a lot of questions.
It's a great name.
It's a connected home over IP.
The idea is that gadgets should have
simpler, easier networking that works more like over IP.
So that's like one thing that's happening
and you're involved in that.
But then the other thing is there's like the radio
called Thread,
which you have been promising
is going to matter and be a big deal for quite a while now.
Since the first day I met you.
Yeah.
Like next, he was like a startup founder and he's like, I made this great router.
And like we had great conversations like early on.
Like we loved startups.
And we're like, what is this radio?
And he's like, this is going to be a big deal.
And that was in 2017.
Yes.
By June of 2017.
Yeah.
You're like, you got it.
And like the, it was Apple is going to support it and Google's and they kind of are now.
but it's still in its infancy.
So why that dip and is it going to happen?
So, you know, what's interesting about thread,
so it's a 15.4 radio,
and what it does is it acts very much like Wi-Fi,
just says, hey, I'm going to create a network,
I'm going to let devices connect to it,
we're going to talk IP, let you send packets,
and I'm just going to get out of the way.
Yeah.
It's really simple, like Wi-Fi.
But it's built for low-power devices.
It's got great range.
great on terms of reliability, and then, you know, it can mesh so you can easily extend coverage
throughout the network.
Yeah, this sounds wonderful.
It's great.
Are there any gadgets that I could connect to this wonderful network?
So I think...
Does a nanoleef do?
You get some gamer lights?
Come on.
So I think with matter, there's a shot that all of this comes together.
There's just, there's so many different ecosystems, there's Z-Wave, there's Zigby.
Have you ever been to the Z-Wave Alliance building?
I haven't.
Okay.
If anyone knows of that building, it's shot.
shaped like a Z, please let me know.
Like, if your organization is called the Z Wave Alliance and you don't find a Z-shaped
building to be in, like, you're not going to succeed.
But like, fundamentally, the question is, like, what's taking so long for thread?
If it's such a great technology, what's taken so long?
We're living in this incredibly fragmented smart home world.
Thread seems like a good, one potentially good solution, but there's too many standards.
We've got to make a new standard.
Why isn't it?
I think it's just, these things just take, they take a long time.
I imagine for us, for a lot of people in this room, like, we've been doing connected home
things for a very long time. When you look at just the average customer, that stuff is still,
it's just starting. And now that there's voice control layers that make things easier to
control, you don't have to do a bunch of custom programming on a home automation system,
we're just, we're starting to get there. And then it's the chicken or the egg problem. Like,
you have to have enough base station support for it so that devices can connect. And,
And then you also need enough devices to move everything together.
And that...
But let me...
I'll push you there.
Like, I've got a bunch of Eros in my house.
Yep.
They support thread.
I could turn them on.
Apple is into thread.
The HomePod Mini is a thread router.
But they won't talk to each other yet, right?
Like the Eros are not HomeKit compatible.
And then if I want to add a handful of thread devices,
they actually still need a HomePod Mini or an Apple TV.
And they won't talk to the...
You're like, are you solving that?
Are you going to talk to Apple?
or you're going to be HomeKit. Is that something Apple needs to do?
I think that's where matter starts to become interesting.
You're going to have these profiles for all the different devices.
It's independent of how the devices are connecting.
We have the ERO Pro 6, the 6, the Ero Pro, and the Eero Beacon are all thread border routers.
You can turn that on today.
I've got nano-leaf bulbs that connect via thread to my ERO network.
What's the first nerd product we should do?
It's like Gamer Lights.
Yes.
And like, everybody has him.
So I think it is, it's been slower than I certainly would have liked, but it feels like it is gaining momentum and starting to finally move in the right direction.
So you're kind of in the middle of it.
Do you see that, and I recognize that this is what matter is supposed to solve, but I see Apple saying, we still kind of want our system to win.
And Google wants that.
And Amazon obviously wants that.
And the incentives are not aligned, right?
like if you buy everything that's Alexa compatible,
that's probably better for Amazon
than if everything works with all three systems
and you can mix and match.
How do you align those incentives?
And how do you manage it in the middle?
Well, so ERO devices, they're gonna support matter over threat.
That is something we are doing,
and we're really, we're excited about that.
And personally, I think customers win
when their devices work with however they want to control them.
And so that's what we are trying to enable,
trying to make sure any device can connect to our network and communicate wherever it needs to.
Just talks IP, just like all their Wi-Fi devices do today.
We've got a few more questions, but if y'all have questions about how to configure your network,
please don't come to the mics because you've got other questions.
There's mics on the other side of the room, and so you can start line up there.
Unplug it and plug it right back in.
Don't. I mean, that is...
Well, actually, the first time we talked, Nick told me that he got the idea for ERO
because he'd put his parents' Wi-Fi setup on a power strip,
and he had like a fix-it button that just turned the power strip on.
Yeah, Internet reset button, power strip, big red button,
and you could hit that.
And then V-1 of automation was you got one of those old-school rotary timers.
Oh, and then just once a day it would click over.
It hits like 202 a.m.
And just power cycles the whole thing.
There was, remember the Kabo?
I always know that an Android-based product is, like, going to run into some troubles
when it has, like, a built-in restart feature that's, like, just, I'm going to reset myself every night.
So good.
All right.
So what's next for thread with Eero?
Like, you say you're going to support Matter?
Anything else you're doing?
Anything else you're going to push?
For us right now, it's just how do we get as much coverage, thread coverage out there as possible.
You know, our devices support Zigby, thread, Bluetooth, and obviously Wi-Fi.
And we're just trying to add as many EROs out there as possible so that we can have that low power coverage that customers are going to need if they don't need already.
So next year, matter is going to matter, you think?
I think everything is trending in the right direction.
We were a little early in 2017.
I don't want to be that early again, but it does feel different this time.
It feels like there's just a lot of momentum.
device manufacturers are starting to really reevaluate their roadmaps.
And also the silicon out there supports all this stuff natively.
So it can support Zigby, or it can support thread,
or it can support Bluetooth, all in the same chips.
So people aren't going to need to.
And so it's just a software setting.
So we finally are starting to get the infrastructure down to the silicon level to make all this stuff happen.
Right.
All right. But you told me you read the subreddit.
I do.
You admitted this to me backstage.
The man wakes up, the CEO, and then reads the subreddit, which is just masochistic.
The comment section is real.
Yeah.
I know that subreddit wants to know if you're going to support HomeKit and Thread.
Are you going to do it?
We are doing everything we can to support Thread.
How HomeKit fits into it.
We're just going to have to see how that evolves here over the next little bit.
Questions?
Hey, so huge fan.
I went from an airport to an Eero, and I feel like that's a lot.
probably a pretty common path for a lot of people in this room. Your first generation of products
is now probably about five years old, and as other companies have had to deal with recently,
life-cycling and supporting them over time of computers living in your home that are really,
really critical to your experience there is going to be a real challenge. What is your strategy
for keeping those things useful for as long as possible? Well, that is our strategy. We are
we are trying to keep the products as safe, secure, and reliable as possible for as long as we
feasibly can. And so that means continuing to, you know, run regression tests on all of our,
you know, first generation eros standing behind them if customers are having problems.
Part of that, too, like, we do want to encourage customers to upgrade over the years to get
faster speeds, more reliability. Frankly, we've gotten a lot better at building these products,
as we've learned over the last seven, almost eight years. But, you know, again, our primary goal is
just keep delivering that great internet experience to our earliest supporters and,
and most importantly, keeping the devices secure because running the network is a lot of
responsibility. We take that really seriously. Do you have a number,
mind in terms of years. We're like, okay, no more. We can't support this anymore.
We're going to try to support them as long as we as long as we possibly can. You know,
you do run into practical limits. If a Wi-Fi router is running more than five to seven years,
it's not going to perform the same way a new device will. You're going to just, it'll slowly
start degrading just because the duty cycle on these things is they're on 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, and they're always sending packets.
So it is something you should you don't need to upgrade your network every year or even every two years
But it is something you should think about upgrading every three to five to six years
Because it's one of the most important devices in our home
We've got time for one maybe two more but please keep it quick
Let's see. All right. So I got a smart home question for you. So we have Z wave which has obviously been around for quite a while and it has that standardized protocol and radio layer
So where does thread and matter succeed where Z wave?
doesn't. Like what went wrong of Z wave? Because it is ubiquitous. There's lots of devices,
but we don't really see it dominating the smart home. Well, they spent all their money in a building
shape like a Z. Yeah, that might be it. So I think part of it is really separating the profile
the device and the connectivity layer. So it's removing like profiles and not having specific profiles for
each device. So what threads really trying to do is separate that out where any device can connect to
the network, send packets. It can then use a matter profile if it wants. It can extend a matter
profile or it can use whatever application layer makes sense for that device. So it's really about
separating things and making it easier for device manufacturers to build devices, deploy them,
and leverage that means of connectivity. Another thing is it's about the RF usage within the device.
And so what's great about 154 is it's running in 2.4 gigahertz.
So it just reduces the amount of RF you have to deal with in the, you know, in the router, you know, for us.
So that, you know, you're not having to deal with all these different frequencies and paying that like per chip cost in three or four or five units or however many units you have on your Euro network.
Well, I think on that incredibly nerdy answer, that's a perfect place to end talking about routers.
So everybody, Nick Weaver.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks, great.
All right, my thanks to Nick Weaver for coming on the Vergecast, talking to us about ERO and thread and the future of the smart home.
And my thanks to you for listening to this episode.
And you know what?
It's been a minute since we've asked for this.
If you could head over to, you know, it's Apple Podcast.
That's a place to do reviews.
Go over there.
Give us a review and a rating.
Really appreciate that.
It really does help the show out.
This week's Vergecast was produced by myself, Andrew Marino and Liam James.
We are going to be taking the rest of the week off for the Thanksgiving holiday.
We'll be back next.
week with an extra special episode that I think you're going to like, and then the following week
we'll have that matter episode and the chat show and so on and so on. If you got any feedback
about these Tuesday episodes, I'd really appreciate to hear that as well. You can find me on
Twitter. I'm at Backlond. Or, you know, you can email me. It's not a hard email to guess. It's
just Dieter at the verge.com. All right, have a good holiday for celebrating and stay safe.
