By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Plume’s vigorous and intelligent effort to position itself at the centre of an evolving smart home services industry continues to bear fruit as yesterday the Wi-Fi and smart home services company announced that a remarkable twenty Wi-Fi 6-capable CPEs now come with Plume’s open-source middleware OpenSync™ pre-loaded. OpenSync is the platform for enabling smart home service delivery from the Cloud.
What do ADTRAN, Askey, CIG, Hitron, Kaon, Sagemcom, Sercomm, Technicolor, and Zyxel Communications have in common? They are all Wi-Fi CPE (home gateway) providers – of course – but they’re also now part of a growing ecosystem of vendors committed to Plume’s OpenSync™ middleware platform for smart home services.
Plume announced today that a total of 20 Wi-Fi 6 CPEs from aforementioned vendors now come with OpenSync pre-integrated. This means that any such CPE now can connect to the Cloud including Plume’s smart home services right out of the box. That’s not only of huge benefit to Plume but also to CPE vendors and of course to home broadband service providers who wish to offer their clients the latest in smart home services – read more about them here.
Plume CEO & co-founder Fahri Diner likens the OpenSync middleware to a SIM-card in a mobile phone: The component that enables a hardware device independent of manufacturer to connect to broadband services. Plume says all OpenSync-powered CPEs from any supplier – including pods, gateways, and extenders – can coexist on the same home network with equal access to Plume services. The result is a cloud-agnostic architecture enabling fast service curation, delivery, scale, management, and support of smart home services, Plume says.
Says Fahri Diner: “To fully capitalise on the benefits of Wi-Fi 6, CSPs must deploy both reactive and predictive cloud management across all hardware platforms to address the increased complexity of the home network. Starting this year, the intersection of an open platform approach and cloud managed Wi-Fi 6 may very well be the winning formula.” Today Plume smart home services are used by 150 services providers and serve more than 22 million homes, Plume says.
Plume IQ: Tablets are popular – but don’t appear to be a growth market
Meanwhile Plume continues to release valuable market information based on data collected from their very large service footprint. The information service is called Plume IQ and you can subscribe to it here. The latest edition reveals that tablets are used in some 60% of homes with Apple leading the race at around 62% tablet market share. Interestingly – as far as homes served by Plume is concerned – it appears that for the time being, there is no growth of percentage of homes with connected tablets from 2019 to 2020. Also see the infographic left.
/Claus.
