Since releasing its new Funbox 6 home gateway last month, Orange Poland has revealed that SoftAtHome was instrumental to the deployment, injecting its WiFi’ON and Connect’ON software into Sagemcom hardware to deliver what claims to be Poland’s fastest WiFi.
This is a crown that operators the world over have been clamoring for during a year of frenzied home working, schooling, and binge watching – and one that Orange is particularly well positioned to claim.
Earlier this month, Orange raised $1.6bn from selling 50% of its French fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) public access network business, Orange Concessions, to a consortium of French equity firms. Orange might be pursuing similar private equity investments to advance its Polish network infrastructure, but in the meantime, Orange Poland is offering fiber connections using GPON to bring speeds of over 1Gbps down and 300Mbps up. It wasn’t long ago that Orange Poland boosted its FTTH footprint with the deployment of G.fast fiber extension technology from Adtran.
SoftAtHome’s WiFi’ON is already deployed on Orange Poland’s WiFi repeaters, and indeed the Orange Livebox ADSL wireless router, and the previous Smart WiFi Box (powered by Quantenna chipsets), so the Funbox 6 marks a significant upgrade to fiber speeds and WiFi 6 standards for higher performance all round.
A lethal concoction of SoftAtHome algorithms on both the gateway and the repeaters carves the most efficient path to the best AP via the right WiFi channel, with optimized control of the seven antennas on the gateway. Green credentials are also waved, with reduced power consumption and recycled plastic.
A key distinction from other recent Orange WiFi projects using SoftAtHome technology, such as last year’s major upgrade at Orange Belgium, is that mesh has not been mentioned anywhere. Indeed, Orange has in the past been indifferent to mesh technologies, once telling us that it had little interest in deploying a mesh WiFi architecture in certain European territories.
The perceived absence of mesh technology at Orange Poland may simply be a case of SoftAtHome’s WiFi’ON software covering all the necessary bases until it sees demand for mesh, which is best suited for large premises spanning multiple floors. WiFi’ON handles auto-configuration, network mapping, channel selection, client roaming management, band steering and video support.
We understand that Taiwanese firm Arcadyan is the manufacturer of Orange’s WiFi repeaters across Europe, and it supports SoftAtHome’s intelligent mesh WiFi system in Belgium and France, while mesh APs from AirTies have also been rolled out by Orange across various European territories. However, Orange’s deal with the Turkish WiFi firm is a legacy one dating back to 2017, one which we have seen no evidence of continuation, and any AirTies expansion looks increasingly unlikely given SoftAtHome’s rise to the challenge in recent years. The telco seems to be settling on a common vendor stack.
The Orange subsidiary’s WiFi’ON software also boasts advantages from distributing AI-based techniques between home LAN components and cloud-based intelligence, catering for the rise in subscribers setting up in-home local area networks over the past year. Additional features include parental control, guest WiFi, HD Telephony over DECT, and key QoS optimizations.
We should emphasize that, in Europe, different countries require unique offerings based on different infrastructures, demands, and even cultures, so there will be method behind the perceived madness of Orange’s splintered WiFi strategies.
That said, Orange is a key figure embracing the new Broadband QED (Quality of Experience Delivered) standard. This is part of the Broadband Forum’s TR-452 and is defined as a new network quality metric that captures variability in network quality – in such a way that relates directly to application outcome and end user QoE. Broadband QED is essentially the blending of QoE and QoS where you can measure and optimize QoE indirectly through measuring and dynamically optimizing QoS.
However, Broadband QED is a method that relies on gathering data by sitting on hardware, and the data it relies on cannot be obtained by being deployed in the cloud. Therefore, adoption of the standard by companies such as SoftAtHome is less likely, not for lack of interoperability, but due to cloud-based WiFi vendors having a harder time making use of the standard.