Recently Amazon expanded their Eero Wi-Fi router offerings in Australia and the main character of the show was the new eero Max 7.

The eero Max 7 is not only a tri-band router (2.4-, 5- and 6GHz bands) but also can be part of a mesh system that supports Wi-Fi 7.  The new advanced system is backwards compatible with older eero devices (as I tested out in my review).

The eero Max 7 is designed to be able to deliver blazing fast speeds, more than twice the speed of Wi-Fi 6 with wireless speeds reaching up to 4.3Gbps, while wired speeds can reach up to 9.4Gbps, giving you the potential to download a 4K movie in 10 seconds or a 50-gigabyte video game in less than a minute.

Design and hardware

Coming from the much smaller eero 6+ mesh routers I found the eero Max 7 to be massive – but it sits inside my communication cupboard at all times anyway so it’s not an issue for me.

The router is sleek though, finished in a glossy white with rounded edges resulting in the tower design.

This added size creates a much larger footprint that allows for more hardware inside.  Bigger router means a better antenna design inside to deliver better range and of course you can fit more Ethernet ports – four in this case.

The range is impressive when used as a standalone router, not in a mesh system.  The signal throughout my entire house was nearly as good as that created by my entire eero 6+ mesh system with 4 routers/mesh points.  

The eero Max 7 is designed to cover a 230 square metre area (which Google tells me is approximately the size of half a basketball court) so can cover most of my house if it is placed upstairs in the middle of the house.  I would increase that for a stronger, more consistent and reliable signal further away with a couple of mesh points though – I have the eero 6+ mesh points so the speeds of those aren’t as high but for my NBN capabilities they are certainly fast enough.

Two of the Ethernet ports are rated at 10Gbps and two at 2.5Gbps.  My Internet is not that fast so it didn’t matter which one I plugged my output Ethernet cable into.  You can use a wired Ethernet backhaul to link multiple units (this is my preference in my house) but if you use a wireless backhaul, the Max 7 will select the band it should be using.   

That won’t prevent you from plugging devices such as your PC or TV etc into the back of the Max 7 router(s) for added speed and stability.  I ran a laptop just for testing purposes like this and it worked great with fast through speeds.

Setting up the router is incredibly easy – even when I already had one eero network in the app.  To get the full featureset you do need an eero Plus subscription, which I actually get thanks to my Superloop NBN plan.  The eero Plus subscription gives you parental control, some network security features, content filters, ad blocking, VPN protection, Malwarebytes anti-malware protection and 1Password password protection (I use Bitwarden so that’s of no use to me).  The eero Plus subscription service is available for $159.99/year or $15.99/month.

Other features include its support for Matter, it can act as a Thread Border Router and has a built-in Zigbee smart home hub to connect compatible smart home devices to your network.

One feature lacking is a USB port of any sort.  A lot of folks plug in a hard drive or NAS to use as a central storage drive but you cannot do that with this Max 7 router (but you couldn’t with the eero 6+ either).  At this price I would have thought they could have included one or more USB ports.

Performance

Performance is what we are all after with one of these right?  Stability is also super important but less often mentioned.  Every single test I did, and I did a lot, the results were high every single time with the speeds high the entire test – the stability seemed great.

As for speeds, my NBN connection maxes out at 1Gbps unfortunately but my speeds were consistently at 970+Mbps which is obviously maxing out the connection.  I was able to get within about 20Mbps of that whether on Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection when in close proximity to the router (within 5-ish metres of it).

Going to the extremes of my house the speeds were – 

  • With just the eero Max 7 router only and no mesh were:
    • 54Mbps
    • 17Mbps
  • With the eero Max 7 router plus three eero 6+ mesh points were:
    • 623Mbps
    • 513Mbps
  • At the extremes, prior to changing the eero 6+ gateway over to the Max 7 gateway were:
    • 536Mbps
    • 431Mbps

As you can see from the speeds you do get a faster overall mesh using the Max 7 as the gateway but not by that much. These speeds were measured during peak periods of the day. Is the small increase in speeds worth the large increase in price? For most people, probably not, especially with where our NBN speeds sit here in Australia.

Should you buy the eero Max 7?

Do you need an eero Max 7 in Australia when the highest NBN speeds are 1000Mbps?  Speeds this high are rarely required unless you have a household with a LOT of concurrent traffic, and all that traffic is needed to be at high speeds.

Eventually we will when we are all streaming 8K movies we may need it but at the moment it is mostly just overkill.  The eero Max 7 is for those folks who want to live at the bleeding edge of technology, want the fastest possible speeds – and of course in doing so future-proof their home router.

The eero Max 7 may be at the bleeding edge with Wi-Fi 7 but it is still a simple set and forget router meaning you don’t have to waste valuable time and brain power on keeping it running. ie. you don’t have to be an IT genius to work with it.

The eero Max 7 though is a great way to transition into the Wi-Fi 7 era, especially if you already have an eero mesh system.  By me adding the Max 7 to the mesh it has given me the ability to connect to the Wi-Fi 7 router if required and also offering possibly faster speeds, both wired and wireless.

Add in the Thread and Matter support along with the Zigbee hub and you have a very handy device.

The eero Max 7 is not cheap though and at $1,099 on Amazon AU is a big outlay to put you at the bleeding edge of tech.  Do you really need it yet?  It is an amazing router with incredibly fast speeds though so how much are these fast speeds worth to you?