Turkey’s Airties, the mesh WiFi pioneer, has been refocusing from consumer-facing connectivity to cloud-based services, while seeking to strengthen its core offering in order to enhance service providers’ ability to monetize WiFi rather than see it as a perpetual pain point.
A recent webinar co-hosted by Airties and F-Secure, a Finnish cybersecurity firm – partners since July 2020 – set out a joint mission to enhance protection from malicious web content, at a time when WiFi usage has ballooned while network security has too often been an afterthought.
Airties set out its refreshed strategy, which now comprises four pillars, according to Ian Challinor, general manager of the EMEA and APAC regions. The first two pillars are well-established – the flagship smart WiFi software portfolio and the accompanying cloud management platform.
The third is less familiar and seems somewhat at odds with Airties’ recent move from front end to back end systems. This is Airties Vision, which allows homeowners to set up their own WiFi networks, provide guidance for WiFi set-ups and help with finding the optimal placing of mesh access points (APs) around the home. Reducing the load on call centers is the appeal for operators in rolling out the Vision app – a burden which can be substantial considering that between 30% to 60% of support calls are related to WiFi.
A neat touch during the event involved a demonstration of the off-the-shelf Vision app, using webinar registration details to personalize the app user interface, which overall looked pretty simple to navigate. As well as the Airties WiFi management, the Vision app now benefits from F-Secure’s Sense router security to protect from hacking, spyware, phishing, and threats to unsecured devices.
For the most part, the combination of Smart WiFi and Sense serves as a platform for operators – blending F-Secure’s own tools with the option to incorporate third party security products. This apparent freedom to use third party security within this framework highlights a tension within the WiFi industry between the convenience of all-in-one proprietary packages meeting all an operator’s requirements, including security, robustness, coverage and performance, and the desire to have best-in-class products.
These qualms have certainly intensified as a result of the pandemic, particularly with the cybersecurity vulnerabilities that have emerged due to the en masse switch to remote working. But in more recent trends, price is a less important factor of WiFi today than privacy, security, speed, and coverage, according to F-Secure’s own consumer survey.
The fourth Airties pillar comprises the company’s range of professional services – maximizing value from its cloud-based services and analytics. The Turkish vendor emphasized the roll-out of software upgrades on existing CPE as a great way to bring smart WiFi to entire customer bases, with its software running on some 40 different CPE platforms today while the Airties cloud platform manages 25m homes.
Giving us a valuable glimpse into the view from the Airties cloud, it has seen a huge acceleration in operators struggling to help consumer WiFi experiences due to the network demands from home working and schooling. This has been worsened by limited ability to send out field technicians, which is why Airties has been emphasizing assisting in seemingly simplistic things such as self-install or remote understanding, which it sees as crucial to maintaining deployment numbers and good satisfaction levels from end users.
Also in recent months, Airties has seen consumers showing a willing to pay for good quality, reliable, and fast WiFi connections throughout the home. As a result, some operators are moving towards monetizing this as a service – with WiFi connectivity becoming a new service offering or market differentiator for operators.
From the F-Secure perspective, Dmitri Vellikok, business development director for the Americas, has experienced a lot of demand for WiFi 6 CPE, as well as a rise in operators looking at how to make better use of standards, so that they can evolve with time to have a WiFi footprint that is both easier to update and to add new services on.
He added that with the introduction of new services comes many new cloud environments, meaning operators are grappling with multi-cloud environments and asking questions about where services are deployed. Can some be stored locally? Can they all be in the cloud? Can some sit at the edge or on the CPE? These are just a handful of pressing questions being asked by operator executives.
Looking at the process to which the Airties and F-Secure services are attached, this is not simply an SDK on CPE, but comprises a multitude of services in the ecosystem that need to communicate – covering provisioning, life cycle management, remote configuration, licensing, support, analytics, profiles, and authentication. Airties and F-Secure together want to remove some of this complexity by allowing operators to cherry pick services for flexibility.