Your Echo Dot can now be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot

Echo and Echo dot 4th Gen speakers from Amazon will soon act as mesh hotspots for Eero Wi-Fi routers.

There are already a lot of Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers with Alexa in smart homes and apartments. Recently, Amazon-owned Eero plans to use these speakers as mesh Wi-Fi amplifiers.

The new feature was announced at Amazon’s fall conference.

This opportunity was announced at Amazon’s fall event where many of the company’s new products were also presented. The feature will arrive on October 20th as a free software update for the fourth-generation Amazon Echo and the just-announced fifth-generation Echo. Soon, the update will also roll out to the Echo Dot and Echo Dot fourth-generation watch.

Once you’ve installed the Eero app, you’ll need to link your home network to your Amazon account and enable this built-in Eero feature. Now your smart speakers can relay the Wi-Fi signal from any Eero mesh router at speeds up to 100 Mbps, which effectively turns the speaker into a Wi-Fi signal booster.

To work, link the Eero Network to an Amazon account through the Eero app, and Eero will automatically detect compatible Echo devices. Then, in the Eero app, you can manage the functions separately for each device. Reportedly, if you have two Echo Dots used as a stereo pair, they cannot be Wi-Fi hotspots. This technology uses the same radio frequencies as access point technology. Therefore, you will have to choose which function to use.

Weaver says Echo hotspots have some latency (ping) because the access point is a network node. But he notes that the delay should be minimal — “a couple of milliseconds.”

“A lot of users have outdoor surveillance cameras or maybe a chromecast that hides behind the TV box and tries to catch a better signal,” said Nick Weaver, co-founder, and CEO of Eero. Such devices can help fill in blind spots.

At the same time, Weaver said that users shouldn’t expect the same speed as an Eero repeater.

Echo devices can add up to 90 square meters of coverage per device to an existing network at speeds of up to 100 Mbps. That’s more than enough for 4K video or HD video calls.

“You will always have better productivity from a specially made network device”, – said Weaver.

You’ll be able to set up Eero Internet Backup in the Eero app and decide which devices will use the backup network during a failure.

Eero Built-In isn’t the only new software update that Eero users should know. There’s also Eero Internet Backup, a new premium feature that allows homes with Eero routers to share a separate Wi-Fi hotspot with their home network.

If you lose internet, the hotspot will connect, and your home devices will stay online. Once the failure is over, the access point will deactivate, and your traffic will return to the Eero network you use. The feature will work with any hotspot or backup Wi-Fi network, including mobile hotspots and 4G (5G) hotspots.

In addition to Eero Internet Backup, the $10/month Eero Plus subscription gives you additional features, including advanced parental controls and network statistics, as well as subscriptions to 1Password, Malwarebytes antivirus, and Encrypt.me VPN service.