By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Plume has been providing market-differentiating technology to J:COM for more than five years and now the Cloud services QoE provider is extending its partnership with Japan’s leading MSO. J:COM services now include access to Plume’s ‘WorkPass’ and ‘Uprise’ solutions as well as extending Plume’s ‘Haystack’ monitoring & analytics with more features, Plume says. J:COM is one of two flagship Plume clients in Asia, the other being India’s Jio.
Delivering continuously managed Wi-Fi to homes and businesses is not common in Japan despite a very high density of users in residential areas. Plume is now extending its partnership with Japan’s J:COM to extend QoE management to ‘very small businesses’ and MDUs as well as to more residential subscribers on J:COM’s growing FTTH network, Plume says in a press release here. The footprint expansion also includes several dozen smaller MSOs using technology syndicated from J:COM, Plume says.
“You can imagine how important it is to optimise Wi-Fi in a country with a huge number of apartments and a very high density of users – which by the way is also the case for most Japanese businesses. Without a solid means of managing Wi-Fi there’s a high risk of poor performance and poor QoE due to high interference levels. We’re now working with J:COM to extend the benefits of our platform to very small businesses, MDUs, and to new FTTH-based subscribers,” says Adam Hotchkiss, Co-founder & VP of Customer Solutions at Plume.
Adam Hotchkiss says Plume’s services and ‘SuperPods’ were big news in Japan when launched as Japan’s ‘first monthly mesh Wi-Fi’ subscription-based service in 2019. Today, J:COM still lists Plume’s SuperPods as one of its most important recent innovations here. Managed Wi-Fi with focus on customer QoE continues to be a significant differentiator as even J:COM’s largest service provider competitors typically don’t offer comparable managed residential services at this time, Adam Hotchkiss says.
Plume’s WorkPass applies many of Plume’s residential Wi-Fi management functions (adaptive Wi-Fi) to the small business use case and then adds features designed for business efficiency including employee and guest acces, security, analytics, even cellular-based backup, as well as an app to control it all from your phone. Adam Hotchkiss says WorkPass is optimised for businesses with up to 20 staff, which are also typically companies operating without in-house IT administrators.
Uprise is the most recent of Plume’s segment-specific services and is aimed at delivering optimised connectivity for MDUs such as apartment complexes and the like. Uprise takes many of its features from Plume’s residential (HomePass) and business (WorkPass) services and then adds MDU-specific features such as tenant on- and off-boarding as well as property-wide adaptive Wi-Fi for best QoE.
“A major benefit of Uprise is that APs for the building block are managed and coordinated together so that users always get the cleanest and best performing Wi-Fi channel. Finally Haystack adds predictive maintenance allowing the CSP to predict potential problems before they happen,” Adam Hotchkiss says.
/Claus.
