By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Leading residential Wi-Fi managed services and solution provider AirTies announced last week that they are acquiring a piece of rival Technicolor‘s home Wi-Fi business called ‘Wireless Doctor’. The acquisition will strengthen AirTies’ product offering as well as expand its team and customer base, AirTies says.
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the past couple of years you will know that managed home Wi-Fi (and multi-AP home Wi-Fi) is one of this industry’s biggest untapped business opportunities. Last week market dynamics delivered another twist to this developing story.
Turkey-based AirTies – who claims to be the world’s most widely deployed managed home Wi-Fi provider – on Wednesday announced that they have acquired a piece of rival Technicolor called ‘WiFi Doctor’. The acquisition lands AirTies a team of 30 managed Wi-Fi staff based in Belgium, an extension of their managed Wi-Fi services portfolio, and not least – once the acquisition process has been completed – many of Technicolor’s current service provider customers as new clients.
The end result of the acquisition is that AirTies will extend its installed base of 25 million homes with – possibly – several million more homes. ‘Wireless Doctor’ will be used to extend the capabilities of AirTies’ own Remote Manager, a Cloud-based solution for management and optimisation of home Wi-Fi services. According to AirTies CMO Oz Yildirim, AirTies remote Wi-Fi management software is today used by more than 50 service providers across the globe.
“The biggest problem for broadband service providers is that they have no visibility on how well – or not – home Wi-Fi is performing. This is the problem we’re solving with our Remote Manager. Now we’re extending this capability to include Technicolor’s suite of Cloud-based software,” says Oz Yildirim. The acquisition also means that AirTies steps into Technicolor’s HERO partnership program.
While AirTies recent success and growth continues to impress, managed Wi-Fi was not always as popular among ISPs as it is today. “We started delivering managed Wi-Fi in 2009 but at the time, the attitude among service providers was that Wi-Fi was not their problem. This has changed radically during the past 5 years. For the last couple of years, we’ve been receiving a new RFP every few months,” says Oz Yildirim. One of AirTies’ current flagship clients is AT&T.
“For many years we had no competition – this was clearly no good because in reality it meant that there was no market. Today we have competitors. And we like this a lot better,” says Oz Yildirim. The company says it currently manages some 150-200 million Wi-Fi-connected client devices.
In 2016 AirTies won the Wi-Fi NOW Award for Best In-Home Wi-Fi Product together with service provider partner and client, Waoo of Denmark.
/Claus.