By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
The Wi-Fi optimisation experts at 7SIGNAL are taking AI-based network operations to the next level: The company is feeding Wi-Fi performance data from agents and sensors into LLM platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude, allowing network administrators to query data sets and even generate reports, ChatGPT-style. Next step is to create agentic workflows that fix networking problems, perhaps even before they become known. The new technology is making AI Ops available to anyone with a network, 7SIGNAL says.
Sophisticated AI operations – including LLMs for querying network performance and more – used to be the exclusive domain of high-end Wi-Fi solution providers. But now 7SIGNAL is making LLM-based AI ops available to practically anyone with a Wi-Fi network.
The company’s secret sauce involves using something called Model Context Protocol, or MCP. In simple terms, MCP allows data from external sources to be piped into LLM platforms for analysis. 7SIGNAL’s new approach means that LLM-based network operations will become more accessible, vendor-neutral, and even much less costly, says Eric Camulli, VP of Customer Success at 7SIGNAL.
“Our platforms allow our customers to extract, analyse, and act on Wi-Fi and other network performance data collected by our software agents and sensors – all of this, of course, with the intention of delivering the highest possible network quality. Now we’re making this data available to LLM platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, which means that anyone with access to a 7SIGNAL solution will be able to leverage the power of some of the world’s most sophisticated AI platforms to understand and analyse network performance,” Eric Camulli says.
7SIGNAL’s platform is vendor agnostic in that it extracts performance data via embedded software agents at device endpoints or in some cases by using dedicated hardware sensors (similar to enterprise APs). This approach to assurance is commonly utilised by enterprises but can in principle be extended to any endpoint device, including ISP gateways.
“It doesn’t matter which Wi-Fi hardware vendor you have. In fact, we expect that Wi-Fi solution providers are likely to begin sharing their network data with LLM platforms, too. More data from the same network is of course even better as the LLM models can then to cross-correlate for additional analysis and fault-finding, for example,” Eric Camulli says. A useful feature available today is the ability for administrators to generate network performance reports very quickly based on 7SIGNAL – and potentially other – data sources (see the demonstration video below).
7SIGNAL says the new approach is a first step towards agentic workflows that begin by identifying real or suspected anomalies and move on to create support tickets. The ambition is to find deep anomaly patterns that can be fixed – for example via network controllers – to prevent future network issues. “Ultimately, the goal is to prevent any network disruption but intermediate steps could for example be early warnings and integrating assurance data with support ticket systems like ServiceNow. We’re quickly moving towards much improved automated network assurance using evolving forms of AI,” Eric Camulli says.
Ohio-based 7SIGNAL delivers network assurance and optimisation solutions to nearly any kind of business with a Wi-Fi network, including retail, manufacturing, distribution, airports, healthcare, education, government, and more. Documented benefits include large reductions in unplanned network down time as well as much faster time to resolve Wi-Fi issues. Eric Camulli says he expects 7SIGNAL’s new integrated LLM approach to immediately deliver further significant cost efficiency gains. This includes much less time spent by network administrators on both resolving issues and performance reporting.
For all the details don’t miss 7SIGNAL at Wi-Fi World Congress in Mountain View, CA on April 13-15.
/Claus.
