Vodafone has been something of an enigma around WiFi technologies when compared with its European operator compadres. A report from The Register this week lifted the lid on the UK telco’s WiFi management innards, revealing its network data cruncher to be AirTies no less, following four and a half years of silence.
Faultline pushed for country-specific details on the deal but AirTies was unavailable for comment.
The big reveal was tucked away in a story on Vodafone’s questionable customer data practices, talking about the wealth of information collected in order to provide the luxury of end user WiFi support. This includes slurping up MAC address, serial number, user given host names and WiFi connection quality, as well as info on the WiFi networks, like identifiers and radio statistics. All this is data is managed by Turkish WiFi aficionado AirTies, hosting it for diagnostic purposes.
“We have taken appropriate steps to ensure that only the relevant customer data required to optimize and troubleshoot WiFi is shared securely with AirTies,” a Vodafone spokesperson told El Reg.
Interestingly but not totally surprisingly, there is no get-out clause. “We are not providing an opt out mechanism because this is an essential service to give customers an improved home broadband experience,” added the Vodafone representative.
Back in September 2015, AirTies was selected to supply its WLAN bridge including mesh WiFi software in Vodafone Germany. This week’s reveal strongly implies that Vodafone has not only gone live with the AirTies mesh across its European footprint but has embraced much of the AirTies portfolio, including the all-important cloud-based Remote Manager platform.
At the time, delivering video was a key factor in Vodafone’s selection of AirTies via the video bridge system and marked the replacement of Vodafone’s Powerline wired network for mesh WiFi technology. This allowed for greater flexibility and ability to serve multiscreen devices such as a smartphones and tablets on top of serving the existing IPTV set top. Most importantly, this marked a turning point for AirTies and the mesh networking market as a whole.
With Vodafone recently hoovering up cable assets across the continent from Liberty Global, an advocate of rival WiFi technologies from Plume, things just got a little more interesting.
AirTies said in October 2018 that it had a tier 1 multi-service operator lined up to adopt its mesh package on the RDK platform and we tipped an expansion deal at Vodafone as one of the primary suspects, because the operator was already both an RDK champion for its GigaTV platform and an AirTies customer for its IPTV as well as broadband services.
What this week’s divulgence shows us is that AirTies is a more significant structure in the Vodafone networking business than previously thought. Of course, the vendor – which boasts a saliva-inducing line-up of tier 1 accounts including AT&T and Sky – is just one chapter in the rollercoaster Vodafone story.
For a telco, Vodafone has been a vociferous voice in cable technologies, most notably at the Cable Congress 2019 event in Berlin, when organizer Cable Europe infamously rebranded to GigaEurope in a move we saw as blatantly orchestrated by Vodafone to align with its GigaTV offering which is replacing Liberty Global’s Horizon TV.
This cable obsession really began when Vodafone bought Kabel Deutschland in 2013, followed less than a year later by Ono in Spain. Before this, we saw Vodafone as a cellular force out of kilter with the rest of the market without any fixed line capability. Now, Vodafone owns an inexplicable 80% of cable in Germany alone after inheriting Unitymedia and also has the VodafoneZiggo joint venture in the Netherlands with Liberty Global which – as we know – should never have been allowed in the first place.
Recently, in June 2019, Vodafone Germany rolled out the DOCSIS 3.1 Touchstone TG3442 gateway from CommScope’s Arris, offered to its 9 million high-speed broadband households, forecasting a rise to 12 million by 2021. Shortly before this, Vodafone in Germany tapped German start-up GiaX to increase speed and efficiency of the Giga broadband service by reusing coax as 10G ethernet for DAA, then providing a virtual node split for pushing the DAA device deeper.
Elsewhere in the Vodafone empire, Norwegian machine learning start-up Domos told us about running trials at Vodafone for its intelligent WiFi resource optimization algorithms.
Vodafone is also an active contributor to the prpl mesh foundation, a specialist in open source WiFi projects. The prpl Foundation was set up to look after the MIPS architecture and has projects in Open WRT, the embedded Linux standard.