Building on a partnership established last year, CableLabs and the WiFi Alliance have developed a standard way to collect and analyze data on WiFi networks in order to predict and pre-empt problems more automatically. The resulting specifications are called WiFi Certified Data Elements, and they aim to provide service providers with deeper visibility into their wireless networks’ performance, which in turn could reduce the need for customers to report issues, with resulting implications for cost and subscriber satisfaction. CableLabs estimates that cable operators waste more than $1bn a year on troubleshooting residential WiFi problems, and that about two-thirds of customer complaints are WiFi-related. Proprietary WiFi proactive network maintenance (PNM) tools are already available, but CableLabs said there was no global…