Just about everyone’s got their own wireless LAN in their home, but coverage can still be a problem—and wireless extenders aren’t always a solution, since you can typically only use one extender per WLAN. San Francisco startup Eero thinks they have the answer: a mesh of wireless access points that can have as many or as few nodes as needed to cover your whole home.

Taking its name from Finnish industrial designer Eero Saarinen, Eero is a Bay Area startup that has just emerged from stealth mode. Their launch product will be their mesh networking product, the eponymous Eero, a small white box which contains a pair of dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless 2x2 MIMO radios with conformal antennas. The Eero boxes run what Eero’s Nick Weaver calls a "fully custom" firmware stack, which uses DD-WRT as a starting point.

The boxes have a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, and 1GB of storage. The Eero custom software allows users to set one up as an all-in-one soho NAT WLAN router with DHCP and then add additional Eero mesh devices through Eero’s cloud-based portal. The cloud component also allows Eero users to receive notifications on their smartphones whenever devices join or leave the wireless network and to issue single-click WLAN invites to friends—which means no more setting up a whiteboard with the WLAN password when people come over for poker night (at least, that’s how it works at my house).

Weaver explained in a Skype call with Ars that the mesh functionality is tied directly to their custom firmware, and they’ve spent a lot of time making sure that it works properly. From a high level, the Eero devices use one of their two radios to talk to WLAN clients and the other of the two radios to talk to other Eero devices. In practice, which radio is doing which bit of communication might change from moment to moment, with the functionality being algorithmically controlled by the Eero firmware. Users who would rather put their own software onto the Eero hardware can install vanilla DD-WRT—although doing so will come at the cost of the mesh networking at Eero’s core.

The Eero team currently consists of 15 people in San Francisco, and Weaver stated more than once during our call that design and aesthetics are extremely important to the company. To that end, Weaver and his team collaborated with Fred Bould on the industrial design of the Eero (Bould is most famously responsible for the design of the Nest thermostat), and the resulting smooth box looks a lot friendlier—and has a lot fewer pokey bits and ugly external antennas—than a Netgear or Linksys WAP.

However, whether it actually functions better is something we can’t yet speak to. The device is available to preorder today at Eero’s site, and individual Eero units cost $125 (or you can pick up a three-pack for $299). We’ve been told that we’ll have to wait for the spring of 2015 before we get some units in-hand to test with, so it’ll be at least a month or two before we can put the mesh technology to the test.