WBA member LEVL has today launched its LEVL-IQ™ device intelligence and identity platform, which resolves issues caused by MAC address randomization which poses challenges to the hospitality network industry, while offering intelligence and insights on all devices in the network. We had the privilege of sitting down with Daniel Zahavi, LEVL’s Co-Founder and CEO, to discuss this new platform and get the details on what it can offer the hospitality industry.
Nearly 5 months into the year, what has LEVL been up to in 2021, and what does the rest of the year look like for the company?
We have been mostly focusing on working with our early adopters and design partners to test our platform on a large scale and with real life data. So far, the results have been phenomenal, the performance and the identification accuracy have satisfied expectations and in many cases have exceeded them. We will keep working with our early adopters as well as new customers in the remainder of the year as well as investing more resources into building more integrations with leading industry platforms. We are planning for GA in Q3 and will be working hard to add additional customers to the platform throughout the year.
LEVL’s new platform for hospitality – LEVL-IQ™ – promises to ensure privacy for guests, while also delivering a seamless network experience. How has this been achieved, and how does LEVL approach any potential challenges that may arise?
We have created a technology that can identify devices based on their network behaviour and without relying on PII or asking the user to install anything or modify their devices. What this technology enables us to do is to identify devices without the need to store or use any personal information or PII. Additionally, this means that the identification can be done by the network and that there is no identifier which is transmitted by the device over the air. This subsequently prevents users from being tracked. These qualities ensure user privacy. The accuracy of the identification that we provide also assures seamless network access and supports all those services which require a very accurate and reliable device identifier. By not relying on PII, and still being able to offer state-of-art accuracy we are able to eliminate the tradeoff between privacy, user-experience and network performance.
What long-term benefits can LEVL-IQ offer the hospitality industry?
LEVL-IQ is a platform for device intelligence, and identification is just one part of its benefits. The platform offers insights and context for each device in the network and answers questions like: What is this device? Is it a personal mobile device or maybe it is a network equipment? Is this device behaving normally for what it is? Is this device a safe device or maybe it is affected by a bot-net malware. How much network bandwidth this device is consuming and what is the QoS it is experiencing? In summary, the LEVL-IQ platform provides everything a network administrator needs to know about the devices within the network to be able to operate a safe, reliable, and seamless network which maximizes the user experience.
What makes LEVL-IQ stand out from other similar platforms available to the hospitality industry?
I think the one thing that sets us apart is the technology that we have been developing for the last two years. This technology offers state-of-art accuracy. In our current deployment we are seeing higher than 99.5% accuracy which is achieved in near-real time. This opens the doors for passive device identification to be practical and to be used as a means for device and user identification, something which was not possible before. To give you a sense about how superior this technology is, the best second platform for passive device identification which is available in the market can get at best to about 90% accuracy, while requiring about 1 minute for device identification, something that the industry cannot really handle, especially in the industries that user experience is critical. This just shows how unusual the performance of our platform is.
There is some speculation around if & when MAC randomization will increase. Are there any advantages to addressing this now, before we know for certain what the future looks like for device privacy restrictions?
As it is with every new technology, it is important for the customers to have some “mileage” with it, experience it, and understand how it works and its benefits. These processes can take some time, and for those who are very sensitive about the continuity of their services (both from a user-experience as well as revenue generation perspectives) and wish not having any disruption in the network performance, it is important to act now and not wait after they already have an issue. History shows us that OS makers make changes to their OSs over night, and I am sure no network operator would want to wake up one day and see that the majority of users on their network are affected and many services they were offering are impacted by these changes.
For more information on LEVL, please visit the company’s website.
