Wow so this is a huge issue. After seeing your post and then googling i found that you should be able to continue accessing your LAN as long as you dont reboot the eero. Still though...WTF.

I read this recent response from an EERO Employee responding to someone. Looks like this is a confirmed issue with no solution.

Original link: [Link: community.eero.com]

--------------------------------------User Comment

Crazgod Crazgod 2 mths ago

Hello. As a long time Eero owner ( I was an early adopter) I want to bump this thread and as an enterprise technologist who specializes in networking with 20 years in my field, I want provide those of you asking questions with a little insight into this problem.

First off, it’s obviously been this way since day one. The reason it does this, and most likely the reason they won’t comment on it, is because the way the Eeros were designed initially, in my humble opinion, had a flaw. They had no form of configuration redundancy, preventing off-line operation, but I’m sure this was intentional because of the hardware utilization gains is it provided.

Unfortunately in today’s technology marketplace too many companies are taking shortcomings and calling them features. Add some old person somewhere used to say, it doesn’t matter how much you polish a turd, it’s still a turd.

In this case, this limitation results from the way the system is built. Essentially the routers you have in your home are little more than dummy clients. In other words, the operating system, or the brains of these routers, is hosted almost completely online. This gives them the ability to run the routers with less of a footprint getting more bang for their buck out of the hardware. The unfortunate but obvious cost is the routers themselves have very limited capabilities on their own.

Now, I’m guessing here but they probably won’t do anything about this because it would require a complete retooling of the software, and more than likely the hardware as well. There may be ways they could do it simpler but the scope of the effort depends completely on how the existing systems are built.

I don’t understand why they’ve remained silent on this for so long either though. While the silence tempts me to think this isn’t a simple issue for them, choosing to ignore everyone here who is begging for this indicates customer support deficiencies more than anything else. It seems to me like they could have redesigned to allow the routers to store the last known configuration from the servers in order to fall back to it in the event of a loss of network connectivity. But, what do I know? I only do this for a living!

As a heads up, this would most likely require them to increase some of the resources in the routers (i.e. memory, storage, etc), which means it wouldn’t be something they could push to existing devices. That means we would only get the new functionality by going out and purchasing completely new, expensive routers. I would imagine it’s possible to get this going on existing hardware, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be the path of least resistance. In other words, it won’t be cheaper or quicker. Most things of this nature are little more than a function of time and money. Given the high prices each and everyone of us paid for these devices, I would venture to say they have both and are choosing to drop the ball here.

--------------------------------------EERO Employee Comment

Jeff C.eero employee eero Community Manager Jeff_C 2 mths ago

Crazgod —

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback and interest in this feature.

I'd like to touch on much of what you mentioned and provide any clarity to what may be potentially confusing to others.

We have never called this a feature, and we have acknowledged that this is a limitation of how eero currently works. As you mentioned, making this change will take a lot of work and improvements to the underlying software, and it is something our team is continuing to work towards. As soon as we have more to share, this will be one of the first channels we update.

Most importantly, an update for this type of support would not require new hardware. Both the 1st and 2nd generation eero, as well as the eero Beacon, are designed to be fully-functioning access points. They have been built with industry-leading design and technology (you can check out the tech specs at the bottom of this page) to make eeros provide the coverage and reliability into homes with the smaller form factor compared to many others in this space.

The main benefits of the current requirement of the cloud-connection are that this ensures your eeros are 1. healthy and stable, 2. updated with our latest eero OS, and 3. secure.

We hope to have more to share soon. We have always stated that eero only gets better with time, and we are still committed to that.