A Few Smart Home Upgrades for Mexico City (Premium)

We just booked the flights for our next trip to Mexico City, in June, and I will be making a few smart home upgrades while we're there.

It's been a while. I used our move to Pennsylvania in 2017 as an opportunity to rethink the technology we used at home, and I created a series called Paul's Tech Makeover to document our tentative first steps into the smart home world at the time. Ultimately, mesh wireless networking, indoor and outdoor Hue smart lights, Sonos smart speakers, and cord-cutting proved so useful that they've endured through subsequent moves. But other related pushes into outdoor security cameras, smart plugs, voice-activated digital assistants, and powerline networking came and went with a whimper.

But now we own an apartment in Mexico City—in fact, it's the only home we own—and it's finally furnished and have implemented the most important upgrades I discussed in Thinking About a CDMX Tech Makeover (Premium) in late 2022: We've upgraded the Internet speed, and have complete More Mobile setups with podcasting gear for the two of us.

But there's always more to do, and we've rethought a few potential upgrades after speaking to friends in the area. For example, I always imagined we'd need a smart lock for the apartment door, and I almost pulled the trigger on that in February. But we don't Airbnb the place, and a neighbor noted that, with 24/7 security at the building's entrance, upgrading the lock isn't all that important. And he's right. I may still go down that path at some point, but it's no longer a priority.

What is a priority is an outdoor camera. We've never wanted security cameras in our home, and our brief foray into outdoor cameras in the last house was more about enjoying wildlife than personally security. And over the past few trips to Mexico, it's occurred to me that an outdoor camera or two on the balcony might be a fun addition, a way to remotely watch the gorgeous sunsets and sunrises we enjoy so much when we're there. And, less obviously, a way to make sure that our Internet connection is still functioning.

I researched cameras during our previous trip to Mexico City in February. But electronics are so much more expensive there than in the United States, and I'd need to upgrade our Wi-Fi network before we could get a camera anyway: The one router we have there now doesn't quite reach the far corner of the balcony where I want to mount the camera. And so I held off on that, vaguely figuring I would solve these problems before the next trip.

And we know how that usually goes. Best of intentions, for sure. But these things tend to slip through the cracks.

In this case, however, I got lucky.

I grabbed a Blink Outdoor 4 camera when Amazon had a sale, paying just $60 for a product that normally costs $100. And I put a price alert on Eero mesh networking equipment: We're quite happy with the three-node Eero Pro 6E system we have here in Pennsylvania, but these products are very expensive. A...