Gert Maes, Josselin Wildemeersch from Proximus, and Jos Delbar from Airties discuss the importance of Wi-Fi EasyMesh with Claus Hetting from Wi-Fi NOW at the Wi-Fi World Congress 2022.

Home Wi-Fi has become synonymous with the broadband service, meaning a poor Wi-Fi service equals a poor broadband service in the eyes of the customer. It is essential, therefore, that broadband service providers invest in this part of the network if they are to remain competitive. Rather than just throwing more hardware at the issue, however, a far more efficient way to invest in the home network is to deploy a single, cloud-based software management layer across the network footprint that can dynamically optimize the performance of the home broadband gateway, and identify those customers who would also then benefit from new or additional Wi-Fi hardware.

However, deploying a new proprietary management software platform over the top of such an ecosystem can therefore be complex, time consuming, and expensive, as it can require additional integration work for each different type or brand of hardware deployed. Although it wouldn’t necessarily help with older CPE, moving toward a more open, standards-based environment would in the long term bring significant advantages to service providers, as any new software could then be efficiently and quickly deployed across all hardware in the field. Standardization can help by simplifying the interoperability effort, enabling quick time to market. One standard that is gaining fast market traction is the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi EasyMesh™ (EasyMesh), and Airties has been one of the pioneers in adopting this standard.