Amazon Eero Max 7 review

Every tech thing seemingly has a premium option these days. Smartphones. Tablets. And now routers. While you can get by with a budget of a couple of hundred dollars, a lot of products with ‘mesh’ in the product description are attracting a premium RRP. And the Amazon Eero Max 7 is one of those priciest picks around. It is impressive in some key respects, particularly on the futureproofing front, but that higher asking price also asks a lot of questions of where the Max 7 falls short today.

Amazon sent me an Eero Max 7 mesh router alongside the Eero Pro 6E (also a single unit), and while I was hoping for more from the pricier Max 7, it was a similarly mixed impression after my initial very positive reaction to the first Eero models in 2020.

Mesh WiFi systems have always been expensive, but prices feel ridiculous these days. You can spend many thousands of dollars on the top-of-the-line Netgear Orbi BE27000 or the TP-Link Deco BE22000 mesh WiFi systems in three-pack configurations. Or you can spend $1,099.99 RRP on a single Amazon Eero Max 7, which makes it a router with mesh WiFi potential, rather than a full-fledged multi-unit mesh WiFi system.

Still, that beyond-$1,000 RRP is a tricky pill to swallow with the similarly priced Netgear Orbi AX6000 or TP-Link Deco BE11000 three-packs in competition. That said, I do respect Amazon for going all out with a futureproofed bit of networking kit, but even Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) homes with a yet-to-be-released NBN 2000 plan wouldn’t be able to get the most out of the Eero Max 7.

Speaking of NBN plans, if you’re in the market for a new one, here are the most popular picks below.

I wasn’t expecting any hurdles setting up the Amazon Eero Max 7 given the breezy experience with the Eero Pro 6E. Download the Eero app first, then follow the prompts. I was able to test shifting from one Eero product to another because the app remembered my Eero Pro 6E configuration, and that was a well-guided experience that got me online in about five minutes. Even with the recommended immediate firmware update, it was all done in around seven minutes.

Admittedly, it’s still a bit annoying that there’s no progress bar or percentage for the firmware update, but it felt a lot faster than the patching process for the Eero Pro 6E. What’s particularly great about the ports is how user-friendly they are. There’s a single USB-C power connector, then four Ethernet ports: two 2.5Gbps and two 10Gbps. Instead of having to connect an Ethernet cable from NBN modem to colour-coded WAN port, the Max 7 automatically senses what’s connected to it and adjusts accordingly.

In terms of extra tweaks, it was refreshing to see that my network tweaks from the Eero Pro 6E carried over to the Max 7. For first-timers or returning Eero users, everything is adjusted via the Eero app. Like the Eero Pro 6E, I’m annoyed that there’s no web portal whatsoever, but the app is logically laid out and easy enough to use. The big con of the Eero app is the $16.99 monthly fee or $159.99 annual cost—automatically selected as the “best value” pick when your network is up and running—for features that really should be part of a product with this price.

These subscription features cover malware and security protection, family parental controls, VPN connectivity as well as network health and data insights. Note that all of these features are part of my noticeably cheaper Synology RT6600ax mesh router without the extra cost.

Band steering is a handy networking feature that intuitively shifts wireless devices between farther-reaching (but slower) 2.4GHz, shorter-reaching (but faster) 5GHz and, where supported, even-shorter-reaching (but even faster) 6GHz wireless bands. As a WiFi 7 mesh router, the Amazon Eero Max 7 supports all three bands with no way to manually separate them. That’s good in theory, but less so when a bit of networking kit doesn’t handle band steering as well as it should or older products only have partial compatibility. Unlike the Eero Pro 6E, the 6GHz channel wasn’t discretely separated for the Max 7, with all under a single network name.

All of my router internet speed tests are conducted with an Exetel NBN 100/20 FTTC apartment connection, using Ethernet for the first test then a Google Pixel 7 Pro for the WiFi tests (via WiFi 6). All of the tests below were done in the morning. Lower numbers are best for latency (measured in milliseconds), while larger numbers are better for download and upload speeds (both measured in megabits-per-second). Use the top line of results in the tables as an idea of best-case speeds at that time of day, then every line below as comparative.

With the disclaimers out of the way, let’s look at the results. First up are the results for my Synology RT6600ax router that I use whenever I’m not reviewing routers, modem-routers or mesh WiFi systems.

Once those tests are done, I set up the Amazon Eero Max 7 and immediately performed identical speed tests.

For context, the fence and across-road results for the RT6600ax are outliers: typically, those are in line with the rest of the inside-my-apartment results. A recent Synology firmware update may be to blame. I was a mix of worried and cautiously optimistic for the Amazon Eero Max 7 results after some polarising wireless speed tests for its Eero Pro 6E younger sibling. It was a similar affair here. Within 6GHz coverage, the Max 7 scores well: most notably for lounge, TV and deck locations.

The latency is uniformly impressive, but the apartment study proves, again, to be a hurdle for single-unit Eero wireless coverage. While 19ms latency isn’t bad, combined with the below-3Mbps download and upload speeds, it effectively makes WiFi slow, unreliable and, therefore, unusable in the back corner of my apartment. For comparison, the RT6600ax had an ever-so-slightly higher latency than the base WiFi tests but basically zero deterioration in speed for download and upload in the study.

While it can’t handle the signal interference in that back room, it still manages to offer better performance than the RT6600ax in the downstairs building lobby and outside the building at my garage. Still, those speeds start to noticeably drop off once you get farther away from my apartment building (i.e. fence and across-road results).

Like 5GHz before it, 6GHz is most impressive at shorter ranges. I test all of my networking gear in the lounge, so it’s no surprise that this space offers the best results, particularly for multi-gigabit network transfers of large files. But the back half of my apartment proves to be tricky for the Amazon Eero Max 7 to reliably manage.

During multiple longer sit-down tests in the bathroom, I would occasionally experience dropouts. After a second Max 7 firmware update during testing, the performance was just as bad in the study with around 20-second dropouts. Manually monitoring the band information on Android, the Max 7 would bounce between 6GHz and 2.4GHz options, with 5GHz apparently being skipped entirely. It really should be 2.4GHz consistently, for the range boost, but the Max 7 seems reluctant to stick to it in the back half of my apartment.

Initially, I thought there wasn’t a Quality of Service (QoS) setting for the Max 7. But upon closer inspection, it turns out the feature that was relegated to a beta setting for my Eero Pro 6E tests, is now tucked away in the network settings. Because I’d enabled it for my Pro 6E tests and those settings carried over, it was still on. To test its reliability, I tried to mess up the quality of video streaming with unrestricted Steam download speeds, but the video buffer didn’t suffer (though the download speeds did expectedly go down).

In terms of other versatility, the two main options cost more. You can pay for extra functionality with an Eero Plus subscription or you can a lot more for another Eero Max 7 to start building a WiFi mesh network. But at $1,000 per unit expansion, that’s a lot to pay to plug potential WiFi woes that I had. Alternatively, you can do an ad-hoc upgrade via the Eero Built-in feature for supported Alexa smart speakers.

At the time of writing this review, the Amazon Eero Max 7 was on sale for $824.99 at Amazon, which is still too expensive for the sort of unreliable WiFi speeds I was getting in my apartment. If you’re not in a home prone to WiFi interference or are comfortable forking out for more mesh-compatible products to plug those holes, maybe the Eero Max 7 is for you. If not, futureproof your home network with something like the TP-Link Archer GE800 gaming router. It costs about the same as the Eero Max 7 but has better speeds and features.