By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Twenty-one years on, Airties – founded in Istanbul but today headquartered in Paris – keeps racking up Tier-1 operator wins, including most recently T-Mobile USA. The connectivity optimisation company says its secret sauce is understanding and measuring the connectivity user experience – and knowing how to fix it. Airties CEO and co-founder Metin Taskin is speaking at WWC USA in Mountain View, California, later this month.
Problems with poor home Wi-Fi connectivity quality have been an issue for decades and today continues to be exacerbated by the do-everything-online-from-home trend. New research (read more here) suggests the problem isn’t going away but actually getting worse. Great Wi-Fi technology is everywhere but fixing this exact problem is not easy, Airties says. It all begins by understanding the user experience itself.
“The truth is that service providers can measure a lot of network KPIs, but many don’t really have a good idea of the end-user connectivity experience they’re delivering. And of course, understanding this is the first step to optimising the QoE. Measuring QoE is one of the things we do exceptionally well, and it’s not something you can do in a lab, because the real world is too complex to model. Once you’ve measured QoE, it is indeed very possible to improve the connectivity experience, even by a lot. This can then be verified by measurement,” says Metin Taskin, Airties founder and CEO.
Airties’ architecture – which many Tier-1 operators have now adopted – involves a real-time intelligent agent in the CPE as well as Cloud management, which includes an AI-based optimisation engine. Add to this Airties’ strong belief in both open-source CPE platforms and industry standards: Airties’ platforms integrate with prpl-based CPEs and the company has contributed a Wi-Fi EasyMesh controller to the RDK open-source stack. These initiatives are critical for success, Airties says.
“In mature markets, ISPs are often hurt by churn. Especially Tier-1 operators – but everyone, really – need QoE solutions that scale and are operationally efficient, which is why our work with standards and open-source platforms is such an important part of our strategy. It helps our operator clients drive up QoE, which translates into churn reduction. Meanwhile, adherence to standards drives costs down. That’s a big reason why Tier 1’s are highly focused on standards. We are too,” Metin Taskin says.
And Airties indeed has an unusual knack for landing Tier-1 clients as well as working successfully with them for years. In May of last year, Airties added T-Mobile USA to a list that already includes AT&T, Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom, Telia, and others. In this case the deal was clinched with a piece of software that optimises home Wi-Fi, which is important for T-Mobile USA’s WAN connectivity delivered over 5G FWA. This year at Mobile World Congress Airties and Qualcomm demonstrated a converged QoE management platform for 5G FWA operators.
“Our Airties Cloud now shows visibility of 5G FWA link performance, which means operators now can get a unified view of QoE across WAN and LAN networks when using Qualcomm 5G FWA platforms. This is unique and high value as it gives 5G FWA operators the ability to manage and optimise end-to-end latency for the first time,” Metin Taskin says.
Meet Metin Taskin and Airties at Wi-Fi World Congress in Mountain View, California, on April 28-30. For ticket and more information, click here.
/Claus.
