The WBA Industry Awards Case Study Series explores the shortlisted and winning entries of the Awards, which are presented each autumn during WBA’s Wireless Global Congress EMEA event. The Awards are a celebration of the excellence and innovation that we’ve seen in the Wi-Fi industry over the past year, and in 2021 the award for Best In-Home Wi-Fi Network was presented to Airties for their Managed Wi-Fi with OpenRoaming & EasyMesh Integrations. We recently sat down with Metin Taskin, Chief Technology Officer at Airties, to get some further insight into the company’s managed Wi-Fi solutions and why they’re the gold standard for outstanding in-home Wi-Fi deployments.
Metin Taskin – Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Airties
Congratulations to yourself and Airties for winning the 2021 WBA Industry Award for Best In-Home Wi-Fi Network! Can you share your thoughts on how it feels to win this prestigious award?
Airties is honoured to be recognized by the Wireless Broadband Alliance for the Best In-Home Wi-Fi Network at the 2021 WBA Industry Awards. Our mission is to empower broadband operators to deliver the best-connected home experience, and as evidenced by this recognition, we believe our complete portfolio – Managed Wi-Fi with OpenRoaming & EasyMesh Integrations – sets a new bar for home Wi-Fi network performance. We are thankful to the WBA, along with our customers, partners, and employees for their shared commitment to improving the broadband experience for millions of people around the world.
Can you discuss how Airties’ portfolio of managed Wi-Fi solutions is capable of delivering outstanding in-home Wi-Fi?
Broadband operators around the world turn to Airties for the design, implementation, and ongoing optimization of their customers’ connected home experience. In order to make this possible, our portfolio includes Airties Edge, which is smart Wi-Fi software for gateways that service providers have already started to use; Airties Cloud, a cloud-based management platform and its companion app, Airties Vision; and Wi-Fi mesh extenders.
Airties Edge software intelligently connects consumers’ devices – including laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. – to the best available band and access point in the home based on real-time in-home network conditions. This software not only powers Airties Mesh extenders, but also enables an existing home gateway/modem to double as an intelligent Wi-Fi access point, improving the quality and stability of the connected home. Airties Cloud platform orchestrates Wi-Fi across homes, optimizing operator gateways and extenders in real-time to ensure a better quality of experience at all time for consumers, while providing insights on connected devices. It addresses the needs of customers in a more efficient manner and also optimizes the network at all times.
After deploying our portfolio, broadband operators consistently report improved customer satisfaction, reduced customer care expenses, increased Net Promotor Scores (NPS), along with increased overall customer lifetime value (CLV) for service providers.
How does Airties’ managed Wi-Fi solutions for in-home deployments compare to similar offerings from other companies?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wi-Fi has become an essential part of our lives at home, similar to electricity and running water. In short, we depend on Wi-Fi now more than ever before, largely due to the “enterprization” of the home, telemedicine, education, entertainment, and the need to stay connected with friends and family. This level of connectivity provides significant opportunities for service providers to differentiate themselves with a better quality-of-experience for their customers, and Airties remains dedicated to helping them innovate to meet these demands.
From a technology standpoint, Airties’ unique hybrid cloud-edge architecture leverages both the embedded intelligence in customer premise equipment (CPE) and the cloud software to optimize performance in the home network at all times while providing diagnostics and management capabilities for the service provider. We are also a proven and trusted partner for many of the leading broadband providers in the world, including Altice USA, AT&T, Singtel, Sky, Telia, Telstra, Vodafone and many others. I believe we provide the best user experience to service providers, and in fact, Airties Cloud actively manages more than 33 million homes with 650 million clients that are connected to Wi-Fi networks around the world.
How do these solutions incorporate technologies such as OpenRoaming and EasyMesh, and what advantages do these technologies provide?
In June of 2021, we partnered with the WBA for the world’s first successful proof-of-concept trial of home Wi-Fi that is supported by the WBA OpenRoaming™ standard. With this technology, we’re bridging the gap between mobile and Wi-Fi networks while users maintain full control of their privacy. At the same time, they can roam between networks without any hassle, and this marks a major step forward for frictionless in-home Wi-Fi. In addition to innovating with the WBA, we also announced in May of 2021 that Airties’ solutions integrate with Wi-Fi Alliance’s EasyMesh standard to combine the benefits of Wi-Fi EasyMesh architecture with the added functionality and control provided by Airties Edge software and Airties Cloud software. These two technologies are now integrated into Airties’ solutions, and we provide a standardized way of integrating our own technology into the networks of service providers. At the same time, we utilize all of the added benefits of OpenRoaming and EasyMesh standards to deliver the best solutions.
In fact, Airties’ software enabled the world’s first service provider deployment of Wi-Fi EasyMesh with Telstra in Australia. Since that time, we’ve progressed our solution and we have several new service provider deployments underway as we speak. Broadband operators can now deploy Airties’ software to upgrade their existing gateways from third-party suppliers to both manage and enhance the performance of Wi-Fi EasyMesh devices, and purchase Wi-Fi 6 EasyMesh extenders from Airties. With these integrations, Airties has set the bar for in-home Wi-Fi networks, and additional use cases are being developed and deployed around the world.
Can we expect to see any further developments or advancements in Airties’ in-home solutions in 2022?
At Airties, our mission is to increasingly improve the in-home experience for our customers. We’re committed to continual technical investment in R&D to keep our customers at the forefront of technological innovation, such as OpenRoaming and EasyMesh. On the technology side, we have exciting initiatives planned for 2022 that we’ll be sharing throughout the year. We’ll also be focusing on helping our customers achieve their key business objectives, such as generating additional ARPU, while improving operator KPIs like NPS and reducing the number of customer care calls that they receive.
Recently, we also conducted a Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) analysis to help operators determine the total incremental financial benefit of deploying Airties for customers over the entire period of their relationship end-user relationship. The analysis shows a CLV uplift of more than $2,000 in revenue per customer by deploying Airties solutions. It also shows that Airties Managed Wi-Fi not only helps improve Wi-Fi performance, it also drives significantly increased lifetime incremental revenue and increased customer loyalty. We will also be focused on helping broadband providers enhance the overall QoE for their customers, and help them explore new revenue generating features such as security, motion-based applications, cellular offloading, and more. We look forward to an exciting 2022 as we help our customers differentiate and monetize their services for home connectivity.
For more information on Airties and their suite of managed Wi-Fi solutions, please visit their official company website.
