By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
With more than 30 million devices under management and close to thirty years of experience, Switzerland-based ADB is probably the most successful broadband solution provider you’ve never heard of. ADB’s pedigree is in set top boxes for pay TV but the company’s focus is shifting: Driving OPEX down and subscriber satisfaction up for ISPs is now the goal of ADB’s quickly evolving platform for remote home and enterprise Wi-Fi management.
It is arguably rare to come across companies who with little or no fanfare have amassed a huge service footprint in a highly competitive market – but ADB has done exactly that. The company began as a major player in the lucrative set top box market of the 1990’s – and it still has an important role to play in that segment. But ADB is now increasingly turning to remote broadband CPE and Wi-Fi management software as its new strategy for sustained growth in coming years, says Philippe Lambinet, CMO at ADB.
“CPE hardware is a low-margin business while building excellent management software is both challenging and high value for ISPs. Today our strength is using our video, device, and service management expertise to craft platform solutions that make a real difference to our client’s financial bottom line,” Philippe Lambinet says. Among ADB’s clients are tier one ISPs in Italy, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.
He also says successfully serving major established ISPs for decades requires a very specific set of skills. “Delivering new home and enterprise Wi-Fi solutions that do everything under the sun is actually fairly easy. What’s hard is making legacy networks perform well and stay competitive in a market where most ISPs are looking to cut costs. We see it as our mission to empower ISPs to deliver the right quality of service, so that home broadband doesn’t become a race to the bottom with low subscription prices, but also poor service quality,” he says.
ADB solutions stand out also because they comply effectively with standards such as EasyMesh, TR-69, TR-098, and others, the company says. This means that millions of ADB’s CPEs under management are not actually ADB devices (although a wide portfolio of ADB CPE hardware is also available). ADB’s epiCentro® platform has been in operation since 2008 and today supports all access technologies as well as a full feature set including advanced QoS (including for Wi-Fi), diagnostics, automatic provisioning, and more.
“A lot of common gateway management platforms don’t really offer good monitoring capabilities. What we’ve experienced is that extending our set top box monitoring to gateways and CPEs has really worked out well for our clients. They’ve benefitted tremendously from our set top box platform, and we’re now building on this expertise and success story. The goal is to deliver an industry-leading platform for managing CPEs and optimising Wi-Fi for a great customer experience,” Philippe Lambinet says.
ADB’s platform and CPE hardware is also widely used by ISPs to deliver broadband services for enterprises. One major European telco has even chosen to partner exclusively with ADB for enterprise services. “Enterprise Wi-Fi requires an extended set of features but on the other hand, they’re also much more profitable for ISPs. Especially solutions for SMEs are an important part of our portfolio today,” he says.
ADB acquired most of its original Wi-Fi expertise through the purchase of Italy-based Pirelli Broadband in 2015. Since then ADB has maintained a presence in Italy and also employs teams in Poland and Taiwan. ADB believes it has every opportunity to become a market leader in both solutions for pay TV and solutions for home broadband for telecoms operators – including Wi-Fi – in coming years, the company says.
Meet Philippe Lambinet and ADB at Wi-Fi World Congress Europe in Geneva, Switzerland on September 23-25 – get your tickets here.
/Claus.
