By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Cambridge-based Netduma is delivering exceptional QoE for connected devices within the home – and the company’s approach is entirely unique compared to any of its connectivity optimisation competitors, says CEO Luke Barlow. Netduma has already secured deals with BT and Telstra and is now on the verge of signing up another household name European tier one telco client. Here’s the company’s secret sauce.
Never heard of Netduma? It’s likely that you will soon – at least if you follow this space – because the company is upending how the connectivity experience within the home is managed and optimised. Netduma’s solution deploys directly on the CPE and boosts QoE by controlling application flows even when they’re offloaded to the hardware accelerator. This is something traditionally considered impossible, the company says. It also reduces Wi-Fi contention by optimising Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 scheduling.
“The speed era is over. Most homes already have 100 Mbps or more – it’s no longer speed that limits the experience. What really holds back the experience today are in-home connectivity problems like congestion, where a single heavy download can starve everything else, along with spikes in latency and packet losses that disrupt streaming, calls, and gaming. Add Wi-Fi contention and the impact is even worse. We’ve solved all of that – and more,” says Luke Barlow, CEO and co-founder of Netduma.
A key differentiator for Netduma is that traffic management happens directly on the CPE as opposed to in the Cloud. Netduma’s Cloud component is minimal and simply tasked with reporting events that the operator needs to see, the company says. Running on the CPE means traffic is managed at the source, reducing Cloud costs and keeping data local. “By running on the CPE we can react in real time without the delays of the Cloud. Our system analyses device and application needs ten times per second while using only around 5% of the CPU, making it both responsive and efficient,” he says.
A critical component of Netduma’s solution is application awareness using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). The system allocates the right amount of bandwidth to each application to ensure the right QoE while Netduma’s Adaptive Congestion Control (ACC) layer eliminates queuing caused by bufferbloat, Luke Barlow says. “The benefit here is that ACC identifies bottlenecks no matter where they may be and can respond to changes in network conditions with minor throttling updates,” he says.
With all of this happening locally on the CPE, privacy concerns can be laid to rest. “DPI data is only used locally to identify data flows and only shared with the ISP at the aggregate level,” Luke Barlow says. The solution includes ‘Optima Insights’ for detailed root cause analysis, he says.
Impressive results lead to major clients
So how well does Netduma’s optimisation work? The company says tests show several-fold improvements in call quality for typical work-from-home tasks – driven by lower latency and near-zero packet loss – while gaming sees 8-10 times better performance thanks to major reductions in ping, jitter, and packet loss. In the case of video streams, improvements arise from maintaining consistent throughput and healthy playback buffers. “We’re completely unique on the market when it comes to optimising connectivity at this level, and our results show how much of a difference our approach makes,” says Luke Barlow.
Netduma has already made inroads into some very large telcos including the UK’s EE and Australia’s Telstra. Netduma’s Wi-Fi optimisation software is currently available on EE’s app as ‘WiFi Enhancer’ allowing home broadband subscribers to prioritise the applications of their choice. WiFi Enhancer was recently updated to include ‘Stream Mode’ to boost video streaming performance for EE subscribers. Telstra’s Internet Optimiser application is powered by Netduma technology while vendors Nokia, Netgear (for Netgear Nighthawk Pro Gaming), Genexis, and Mercku are all Netduma partners.
We’re delighted to announce that Netduma is a new WiFi NOW Partner – so watch this space for a lot more information in coming weeks and months.
/Claus.
