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Delivering a premium wireless experience to subscribers today depends on having the Wi-Fi performance optimized to support a growing number of devices, accessing an ever-increasing number of bandwidth-hungry services, with the same level of quality everywhere in the home.
Today you can proactively manage and improve in-home wireless performance to ensure the best possible experience for your users with a diagnostic and cure software suite embedded in your gateways and extenders.
Indeed, with Wi-Fi performance being the largest category of inbound support calls, these tools are now a must-have to improve customer service by actively monitoring the performance of millions of Wi-Fi devices connected to the home gateway. Additionally, managed Wi-Fi strategies make it possible to anticipate and preempt first-time calls related to wireless networking issues through proactive management of the in-home Wi-Fi networks.
In general, Wi-Fi issues can be split into two distinct categories: unable to set up a connection and bad or degraded connection speeds. While connection issues can be solved with a deterministic multi-step approach (e.g. a flow chart), stability or performance issues are variable by nature and require in-depth knowledge of the latest Wi-Fi protocols as well as radio frequency in order to devise a solution.
In fact, there are five key steps to master if you are going to provide the highest quality of experience to subscribers in a Wi-Fi environment:
- Visibility – You must have tools that allow your teams to remotely monitor wireless service to diagnose problems at the subscribers’ home, and then quickly resolve them.
- Proactive Channel Planning – Once you have clear visibility into your subscribers’ home network, you can leverage insight from existing gateways to clearly understand and maximize wireless usage — not only taking into account the subscribers’ home, but also adjacent residences that might cause interference or have service from the same operator.
- Intelligent Extenders – As you ensure full wireless coverage in the home, it will be increasingly important to intelligently deploy extenders, because “more” may not always be “better.”
- Self-Install – The complexity of Wi-Fi deployment needs to be effectively managed. One of the promises of the growing acceptance of EasyMesh for example is that it will allow customers to easily install multiple access points — even from different vendors.
- Optimized Coverage – Once a residence has more than one access point location, thanks to the intelligent deployment of self-installable Wi-Fi extenders, you can further improve wireless quality of experience in the home by allowing smart steering of clients between the deployed access points, based on physics as well as services being consumed.
Technicolor’s product range of broadband gateways, routers and extenders support the latest Wi-Fi technologies in a variety of configurations. They are based on open-software stacks such as Technicolor HOMEWARE or RDK-B and pre-integrate our HERO partner’ solutions such as AirTies, designed to help you boost Wi-Fi performance in the home, reduce churn and create new revenue-generating opportunities.
