The new Eero Signal could have saved me a lot of headaches when I was dealing with regular internet outages at my home last year. See, Signal automatically detects when your internet goes down and switches your whole Wi-Fi network over to a cellular connection to minimize disruption. Sure, when I’d suddenly see a “Slack is trying to connect” message, I could pull out my phone and hop on the hotspot, but that only brought my laptop back online. My TVs, the computer in my studio, my kid’s iPad, these all stayed connected to the now useless router.

All of this is only useful to you if you’ve bought into the whole (rather pricey) Eero ecosystem. Otherwise, you might need to stick to your phone’s hotspot when the next storm takes out a telephone pole.

Update, September 5th: Updated to clarify the data caps on Eero’s backup data plans.