By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
TP-Link continues to be the hands down world’s number one provider of Wi-Fi products (by worldwide shipment volume according to IDC’s WLAN Product Tracker) and now the company is using its dominant brand position to make significant inroads into the market for ISP-managed Wi-Fi. More than 300 ISPs across the US have already chosen TP-Link as their supplier since the launch of TP-Link’s Aginet solution in 2022.
TP-Link may not be making a lot of noise about it – but the company has since the 2022 launch of its most recent managed Wi-Fi solution platform for ISPs (dubbed Aginet) been racking up win after win. In the US market alone the company now says it services more than 300 ISPs (many of them WISPs). TP-Link says its secret to success is turnkey deployment, adhering to standards, and delivering great Wi-Fi hardware for all price categories and performance levels.
“If they were to be blatantly honest, most ISPs would likely tell you that they would prefer not to be in the CPE business at all, because it’s cumbersome, costly, and complex. Our strategy is to make ISP-managed Wi-Fi as simple and efficient as possible. To do that we build on the success of our retail products and add management at probably the most attractive price point on the market,” says Sean Montgomery, Director of System Engineering at TP-Link USA.
Sean Montgomery says that TP-Link managed Wi-Fi solution can – in many cases – be ready to operate in hours or at the most in days. “We can have an ISP set up and ready to operate using our platform almost immediately, depending on the extent of integration to other systems, like billing and more. Speed test is built in, upgrade and file servers are already in place, and the app can be branded to the ISPs liking pretty much immediately,” he says.
A key to success: Adherence to standards
He also says that setup is free and that TP-Link is laser-focused on delivering the best CPEs in the business and less concerned about making big profits on remote management software. “We even pass savings on to our clients when for example our web services provider reduces server capacity costs. And we stick to a single price per customer per year for the management software – not a fee per managed device,” he says.
The second key to TP-Link’s success with ISPs – says Sean Montgomery – is adherence to standards. “Everything running on the Aginet platform supports TR-369 and EasyMesh. This also means that any device can be a main device or a mesh unit, which simplifies architectures for ISPs,” he says.
TP-Link was one of the first vendors to launch retail Wi-Fi 7 routers, which means current high-end routers (including manageable Aginet CPEs) are already second generation Wi-Fi 7. “At the high end, our hardware is all about supporting the drive towards 10 Gbps broadband services. To do that the CPEs need to support 10 Gbps or more on both the WAN and LAN side – and of course for Wi-Fi, which is exactly what we do. Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, and Wi-FI 6E mesh routers are of course still available and popular, including our Wi-Fi 6 HX510 outdoor mesh unit and our ceiling-mount Wi-Fi 6 HX510 unit with PoE,” Sean Montgomery says.
TP-Link currently offers a total of five Wi-Fi 7-capable CPE mesh routers on the Aginet platform ranging from the dual-band HB210 at around 3 Gbps all the way up to the latest BE22000 tri-band unit (HB810) delivering up to 22 Gbps.
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/Claus.
