By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Wi-Fi planning and surveys are of course important – but the truth is you may know surprisingly little about what’s really going on with your Wi-Fi service once you’ve left the property. Epitiro is one of a small handful of companies delivering the tools to keep service providers and property owners confident that their business-critical Wi-Fi networks are up to scratch. And peace of mind is surprisingly affordable too, Epitiro says.
The beauty of Wi-Fi networks is that you can pretty much get away with plugging in some APs and going away, job done. It won’t be great but it will probably work, at least initially. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi’s remarkable ease-of-installation often comes back to bite venue owners and Wi-Fi users alike because change and disruption is unavoidable – and then what? It’s an important discussion that has been inherent to Wi-Fi networking for decades – and it’s not going away. But fortunately, solutions exist.
“It is often difficult or sometimes impossible to know exactly what is going on with your Wi-Fi service as seen from within the network itself. That’s the fundamental reason third party remote Wi-Fi service monitoring from outside the network has become essential to a lot of property owners, MSPs, and many others. It provides independent assurance that things are running correctly and meeting key KPIs and any business SLAs,” says Des Owens, Chief Operating Officer at Epitiro.
Epitiro’s platform uses data-logging hardware probes to continuously test and monitor connectivity and service performance. The company says one or two probes are typically enough to monitor a 100 AP Wi-Fi network. Epitiro’s remote agent runs on its own or third-party hardware (including OpenWiFi APs) and troubleshooting apps can even be installed on phones and tablets, the company says. Current clients – including MSPs, ISPs, property owners, IT departments, and more – select Epitiro for all kinds of specific operational reasons which means it is hard to pinpoint a ‘typical user’, Des Owens says.
“The common denominator among our clients is that they want assurance. They want to know they are getting the service they are paying for or – in the case of a service provider – they want to be assured that they are delivering the service they’ve promised. In some cases property owners monitor connectivity, uptime, connection success, and throughput performance throughout the day. But we also – for example – have government regulators who are increasingly interested in knowing what speeds are available so as to control subsidies, for example. It is also just a simple way of monitoring services for IT departments who want a third-party view,” Des Owens says.
Epitiro has also developed its own score for Wi-Fi quality by aggregating a number of measurements that ‘matter to the user’, the company says. The scores achieved also help to benchmark Wi-Fi and Internet services in general. Epitiro has recently turned a sharp corner and is now growing its monitoring footprint through strategic partnership deals and securing large clients.
“We recently took on a very large US provider of student housing as a client, they serve something close to 100,000 beds in student housing. We also recently signed with one of the leading new providers of Wi-Fi as network-as-service, for them it is business critical to be able to quantify and verify the service they are providing from outside their own infrastructure,” Des Owens says.
Epitiro’s monitoring solution starts at as low as US$10 per measurement agent (AP) per month. Des Owens says most customers end up paying from a few hundred up to a few thousand dollars a month to monitor their networks. For more on pricing, also read here.
Meet Des Owens and the Epitiro team at Wi-Fi World Congress in Mountain View, California, this April 28-30. For more information and tickets, click here.
/Claus.
