Turkish WiFi specialist AirTies says it has landed one of its most significant US wins at US telco Frontier Communications, which will use its WiFi Mesh architecture to extend WiFi throughout a home.
Frontier operates in 29 US states and has 2.5 million broadband customers and 543,400 pay TV customers, which come from a combination of Dish Network, which it resells, and both U-Verse and FiOS, on fixed lines which Frontier has acquired from Verizon and AT&T. It may even include some resold AT&T DirecTV customers.
It looks to us from taking a peek at the Frontier website that the AirTies WiFi is bundled into its Frontier Secure broadband, undersold more as a wireless extender, than pointing out its true qualities of a mature mesh.
Most wireless extenders either work using a second SSID, which confuses the hell out of your in-home devices, or are complex to set up. The AirTies system is a one touch set up, where the mesh shares information across different Access Points and all share the same SSID, and it has advanced facilities like Client steering, which forces the correct selection of the closest AP in the right channel (5.0 GHz or 2.4 GHz) for each client, to even share the load on the WiFi network.
This is a good deal for AirTies but it is not one of deals it has hinted at for a while now taking about “working with a number of tier 1 US operators.” AirTies also has a mesh that will work over both WiFi and another fixed line medium such as powerline or MoCA, and also has its Remote View software which allows engineers to understand WiFi faults remotely and instantly fix them, and it boasts that this gets WiFi to perform at close to its theoretical maximum.
We would expect that Frontier may introduce these features after more experience with the AirTies devices.
AirTies has installed the powerline backhauled mesh at Sky’s Sky Q set top, but no customers have yet officially installed the Remote View software launched at TV Connect. Other AirTies customers include Vodafone, Singtel and Swisscom.