Eero CEO Nick Weaver on 5G, Thread, and the future of the smart home

Nilay 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, integration of 5G, and what's next for the smart home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  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 Neelai Patel and I did with the CEO of ERO, Nick Weaver. We had 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. And 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 threat.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  And Matter. So Thread, if you're not familiar with it, is a kind of radio for smart home devices that Eero in particular, but a lot of people in general have been hyping for several years now, but never seems to amount to 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 you could call it Chyip 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 Eero's whole jam is connecting things in your home. They make Wi-Fi routers, and they also now make a version of Eero that connects up to a Ring Pro and can

• 2:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  I like this foreboding distance that we have.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  I know, you got both of you over there.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  What's gonna happen to Nick?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  You tell me.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  There's actually a bucket of water, you know, just if you answer a question.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  The slime machine?

• 3:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, perfect. So I actually want to start with the new product that you made? Amazon made?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Ring made? We made it together.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a Ring Alarm Pro. And if you're not familiar, one of the cool things about it is it has Eero built in. And how did that happen? Did you make it? Did they call you and ask you? Like, what happened there?

• 3:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  So it makes perfect sense to put Wi-Fi into a device like Ring. But again, like, did they ask you? Did 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?

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Phone call, meeting. We all know how to reach each other.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  There's a lot of flexibility.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  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?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  I think there, with Echo devices, you've got them everywhere in the house.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, an Echo in your kitchen is a great place for a router.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  It could be.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Will it be?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  You know, we've looked at everything. And, you know, in the future, who knows? It might, it might make sense to converge more of those devices than we have in the past.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  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, why LTE and not 5G?

• 5:58Speaker 03

  When we're, you know, looking at, you know, what's required for, for an alarm system, LTE provides just, you know, just enough connectivity that you need. You know, 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, you know, 5G still evolving, and depending on what flavor of 5G, sometimes it doesn't get through walls particularly well.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Oh boy.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  And so that was one of the considerations that went into that product decision specifically.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  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 arguing. But there's another argument that you would want to fail over to 5G when your internet goes down and that would be really fast. There are the home internet services from the providers. Is that, do you see that as a viable path?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  I think when we look at the performance and reliability of Eero 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. You know, a lot of it comes down to the amount of data you're going to use. Cellular is fairly expensive. And, you know, in particular with 5G at super fast speeds, you can consume a lot of data really quickly. And the cost per gigabyte is still fairly high.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  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 like, the claim has been, well, we're not going to need Wi-Fi anymore. Everything's going to have 5G. It'll be great.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think 5G and Wi-Fi are really great complementary technologies. 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, you know, your own local network. That's, you know, 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.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  And you lose a lot of that control and capability if it's all connecting directly to a cellular network.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Right, so you don't feel any competition at all from 5G?

• 8:35Speaker 03

  I think, again, it's a really great complementary technology.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Is anyone feeling anything at all from 5G?

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's that.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's like, kind of the big question is, yep, I get it, you need a connection, you need a fast connection to your house, they need to redistribute it to all the things in your house. Are you seeing a higher attach rate of like T-Mobile at home 5G or Verizon has a fixed service in like Texas? Are you seeing those numbers tick up versus straight cable?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Here's a weird one, I have gigabit internet and it sucks.

• 9:32Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna fix T-Mobile's network, right here, right now.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  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, like, 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 gonna be able to do?

• 9:53Speaker 03

  When we're designing our products, it's being designed independent of your internet connection. We are just trying to make our radios 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, you know, 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 gonna see great upload speeds because you're limited by the pipe coming into your home. But the Eero network is gonna perform as well as we possibly can make it.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  It's improving.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  That's a low floor.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  It's just a transition and everybody's been hearing about this for months and months and months. The supply chain's also backed up and things are a lot more expensive. It's chips are more expensive, labor's more expensive, shipping is more expensive.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Is there like a cargo ship that's just like full of Eros, just like floating around?

• 11:20Speaker 03

  There's probably a few of them at this point.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Is that something that you pay attention to as a CEO? Like, do you get a report that's like, "We actually can't, we're waiting for a container to unload with product"?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  I have spent more time on the phone with our head of manufacturing operations in the last year and a half than I think we had in the last three years or four years before that. It has consumed a lot of time and energy and, you know, our teams have been just working around the clock. You know, you fix one problem, another one pops up. It's a huge, huge game of whack-a-mole and in particular, getting product to customers, like that is something, yeah, I'm really involved in.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  So that actually surprises me because I would assume, if you guys don't know, Eros 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 like 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 are you still like, "No, this is mine, I will always control this part of the business"?

• 12:25Speaker 03

  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 it's relationships, capacity, thinking about like 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, you know, greater team a lot. Then there's also strategic planning, you know, what sub-suppliers can we work to, work with together and really aggregate, you know, the demand of radios or memory or other parts

• 13:06Speaker 03

  of the supply chain so we get, you know, better scale, better support and can deliver just better products for customers. So we've done a lot of that. But yeah, we, Amazon's very much about single-threaded ownership and, you know, that's my responsibility at Eros, keep driving the company, keep driving the product portfolio. Keep building great, great devices for customers.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  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, can we get the boys some Eero routers?"

• 13:39Speaker 03

  I haven't had that conversation yet, but you know.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  You should. That's my only suggestion.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have more about Thread, but that's my real one.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  It's coming, yeah. I guess a lot of time about getting stuff out to customers. You have, people who 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?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's been a huge part of our business. So, over the last year, our Eero networks that get deployed by our ISP customers have increased over 75%. And, and that's just because customers want faster speeds. When they get faster speeds, they want faster wifi and they want coverage everywhere. So, we've announced deals with TalkTalk in the UK, MediaCom here in, 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.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  And, and, and working really closely with internet service providers is a, is a really big part of our business.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Is that gonna be a bigger part of your business than selling direct to consumers?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  You know, over time, we'll see. You know, we, we sell a lot of Eros on, you know, with retail partners like Best Buy, Costco.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  That's good. You mentioned the other ones before. We were like.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  And then on Amazon.com.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  Hulking Goliath in the corner.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  We also sell it on Ero.com.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  Actually, when you think about like, where is it growing? We, we are gonna talk about Thread and Smart Home.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  It's coming.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  But when you, we've made you wait for the punishment. But when you think about, okay, like my cable company is going to put an Eero on 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.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  We have an entire exhibit to a cell phone that was destroyed by carriers. Dieter made a documentary about. Like, is that something that's happening to you, too?

• 15:54Speaker 03

  So, Eero devices across the globe, regardless of where they were bought or where they're coming from, all run the exact same software. They all talk to the same app. You have the same controls. So, for customers, if you get your Eero from your local ISP, or you buy it from Eero.com, you're going to have the same experience.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  And you're committed to that? You're never going to white label it? You're never going to let ISP mess with it?

• 16:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  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.

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• 19:11Speaker 01

  All right, we're back with more of our interview from the On The Verge event with the CEO of Eero, Nick Weaver.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Okay, so I promised we were gonna fix the smart home and it was not gonna be confusing anymore. But before we do, I want you to pull out your phone.

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  And we're gonna look at our Eero networks. Neela, you too.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  And we are all going to find the most embarrassing thing currently connected to our smart home and we're gonna cop to it and explain why we have it. So this is really a radio, you're watching us.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  We all have phones here. I knew this was 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.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:58Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a 2.4 and it's made by a company called Espressif.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  That's, yeah.

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  That's just spyware, dog. Like, I don't know what you're doing.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Maybe someone's spying on me, yeah. What do you got?

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  Mine is extremely dumb. It is also a plug, but I know what it does. It turns the subwoofer 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

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  coming from right above us. So I put the subwoofer on a plug and I turn it off before we podcast.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know why I turn it back on. It's because like, she's not like, I don't know, the base response to the show. But I always turn it back on.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  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...

• 21:13Speaker 03

  It's been a very long project.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  Do you have a HomeKit Bridge?

• 21:17Speaker 03

  I do have a Hoobz box.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we have 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 Hoobz box is like, alright.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  I've been experimenting. It's an interesting experience. Very hard to configure.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  If you don't know, Hoobz 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 cameras show up in HomeKit. Dieter 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 bed friends.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  I think it's great. But I've, like, we've heard, like, lots of Apple engineers have this thing running. And like, 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 Pis to make their smart homes work. But that is the current state of things. You're working on fixing it. How's it going?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Well, you know, our whole thesis at Eero, 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.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  So there's two big things happening. One, there's this industry group called Matter, which is Apple, Google, Amazon.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Formerly Chip.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Formerly Choi.

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  My t-shirt that says "We Matter" raises a lot of questions. It's a great name.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  It's a connected home over IP. The idea is that gadgets should have like 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.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  Since the first day I met you.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  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 love startups. And we were like, what is this radio? And he's like, this is gonna be a big deal. And that was in 2017.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Yes, about June of 2017.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're like, you got it. And like the, it was Apple's gonna support it and Google's, and they kind of are now. But it's still in its infancy. So why did it, why that dip? And is it gonna happen?

• 24:16Speaker 03

  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 gonna let, I'm gonna create a network. I'm gonna let devices connect to it. We're gonna talk IP. Let you send packets and I'm just gonna get out of the way.

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, this sounds wonderful.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  It's great.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Are there any gadgets that I could connect to this wonderful network?

• 24:54Speaker 03

  So I think, I think with-

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  Does it have an analift, dude? Can you get some gamemix, come on?

• 24:58Speaker 03

  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 Zigbee.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever been to the Z-Wave Alliance building?

• 25:08Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay. If anyone knows if that building is shaped like a Z, please let me know. Like if your organization's called the Z-Wave Alliance and you don't find a Z-shaped building to be in, like- You're not going to succeed.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  But 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...

• 25:32Speaker 03

  I think it just, these things just take, they take a long time. I imagine for us, for a lot of people in this room, like, we have 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, you know, 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 then you also need enough devices to move everything together. And that...

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  But let me, I'll push you there. Like, I've got a bunch of Eros in my house.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  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? Are you going to be HomeKit? Is that something Apple needs to do?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  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 Eero Pro 6, the 6, the Eero Pro, and the Eero Beacon are all Thread border routers. You can turn that on today. I've got NanoLeaf bulbs that connect via Thread to my Eero network.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  What's the first nerd product we should do? It's like Gamer Lights.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  And like, everybody has them.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Well, so Eero devices, they're going to support Matter over Thread. 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.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  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 mic. We're going to fix your Wi-Fi. There's mics on the other side of the room and so you can start.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  Unplug it and plug it right back in.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  I mean, that is...

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, actually, the first time we talked, Nick told me that he got the idea for Eero 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 and off.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, internet reset button, power strip, big red button, and you could hit that. And then V1 of automation was, you got one of those old-school rotary timers.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  Oh, and then just once a day it would kick over?

• 28:54Speaker 03

  It hits like 2:02 AM and just power cycles the whole thing.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  There was, remember the Cabo? I always know that an Android-based product is like gonna run into some troubles when it has like a built-in restart feature that's like, just, I'm gonna reset myself every night. So good, alright.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  So what's next for Thread with Eero? Like you say you're going to support Matter, is there anything else you're doing, anything else you're gonna push?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  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 ZigBee, 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, they don't need already.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  So next year, Matter is gonna matter?

• 29:43Speaker 07

  You think?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  I think it's, 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 ZigBee, or it can support Thread, or it can support Bluetooth.

• 30:12Speaker 07

  Right.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  All in the same chip.

• 30:13Speaker 07

  So people are gonna need to...

• 30:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:22Speaker 07

  Right.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, but you told me you read the subreddit.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  I do.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  You admitted this to me backstage. The man wakes up, the CEO, and then reads the subreddit, which is just masochistic.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  The comment section is real.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I know that subreddit wants to know if you're gonna support HomeKit and Thread. Are you gonna do it?

• 30:39Speaker 03

  We are doing everything we can to support Thread. How HomeKit fits into it, we're just gonna have to see how that evolves here over the next little bit.

• 30:49Speaker 07

  Questions? Hey, so huge fan. I went from an airport to an ERO, and I feel like that's 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 gonna be a real challenge. What is your strategy for keeping those things useful for as long as possible?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Well, that is our strategy. 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 run regression tests on all of our first-generation EROs, standing behind them if customers are having problems. Part of that, too, we do wanna 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.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  But, you know, again, our primary goal is just keep delivering that great Internet experience to our earliest supporters and, most importantly, keeping the devices secure. Because running the network is a lot of responsibility. We take that really seriously.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Do you have a number in mind in terms of years, like, okay, no more? We can't support this anymore?

• 32:27Speaker 03

  We're going to try to support them 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.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  We've got time for one, maybe two more, but please keep it quick.

• 33:10Speaker 08

  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 with Z-Wave? Because it is ubiquitous, there's lots of devices, but we don't really see it dominating the smart home.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, they spent all their money on a building shaped like a Z.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that might be it.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  So I think part of it is really separating the profile of the device and the connectivity layer. So it's removing like profiles and not having specific profiles for each device. So what Thread's 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, you know, 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,

• 34:14Speaker 03

  that means of connectivity. Another thing is it's about the RF usage within the device. And so it's great about 15.4 is it's running in 2.4 gigahertz. So it just it reduces the amount of RF you have to deal with in the router for us. So that 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 Eero network.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Well, I think on that incredibly nerdy answer, that's a perfect place to end talking about routers. So everybody, Nick Weaver. Yeah, thanks.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  All right. My thanks to Nick Weaver for coming on the Vergecast, talking to us about Eero 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, it's Apple Podcasts, it'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 Backlon. Or you know, you can email me. It's not a hard email

• 35:40Speaker 01

  to guess. It's just [email protected]. All right. Have a good holiday for celebrating and stay safe.

• 35:51Speaker 09

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