XCellAir™, a company specialising in Wi-Fi Quality of Experience (QoE), has released a free tool called the Whole Home Wi-Fi Advisor.
Available on XCellAir’s website, it demonstrates how internet service providers (ISPs) and multi-system operators (MSOs) can engage residential customers in creating a customised Wi-Fi service. It calculates the optimum Wi-Fi service configuration to ensure ISPs and MSOs provide reliable Wi-Fi performance and coverage to customers in every room of the home.
Broadband customers are increasingly reliant on good quality Wi-Fi within the home. Whether that is to support video streaming, home working or the growth of the ‘smart home’, the need for quick and reliable Wi-Fi is a must.
Yet the majority of consumers do not know how much bandwidth speed they need to support their smartphones, tablets, laptops and streaming devices, or if more than one router is needed to guarantee Wi-Fi coverage throughout the entire home.
XCellAir’s Whole Home Wi-Fi Advisor enables ISPs and MSOs to offer Wi-Fi services that meet individual customer needs, as opposed to offering “speed-based” packages that are often hard to translate into usage needs.
By asking a few simple questions, such as the number of people and size of a home, the number of devices, and where the primary internet connection is located, the Wi-Fi Advisor tool calculates the Wi-Fi speeds needed to support devices, as well as the number of access points required to ensure high performing Wi-Fi.
Initial findings from the soft launch of XCellAir’s Wi-Fi Advisor show that:
- The average household, typically made up of a single family of 3 people, has around 14 internet connected devices.
- The average home is made up of 2 floors, with the majority keeping their primary Wi-Fi router on the first/ground floor.
- While the average Wi-Fi speed need for a household is 23 Mbps, the peak speed needed to support all devices within the home is 40 Mbps. However, this will only increase as more 4K content becomes available from TV broadcasters and video content providers.
- Taking into consideration the number of people, devices, and size of home, the average household requires 2.6 access points in order to have complete Wi-Fi coverage throughout the home.
“Thanks to the explosion of TV streaming services and the advent of smart home devices, consumers are becoming increasingly dependent on Wi-Fi within the home. With so many more connections, Wi-Fi not only needs to support an array of devices and services, it also needs to ‘just work’ continuously at the highest performance,” said Todd Mersch, co-founder & executive vice president of Sales & Marketing at XCellAir.
“Broadband Wi-Fi speeds offered by internet service providers mean nothing without understanding what individual requirements are, and customers are growing increasingly baffled by the range of packages available to them. Home Wi-Fi Advisor provides an example of how ISPs can guide customers to choose “best fit” Wi-Fi services and technology packages to ensure every single customer’s Wi-Fi needs are met.”
Faced with the broadband threat brought by mobile service providers, the ability for ISPs and MSOs to charge purely for internet speed is eroding quickly as the net bandwidth delivered is beyond what most services require. Meanwhile, the last “fifty feet” inside the home is for the most part an unreliable and unmanaged Wi-Fi service.
Instead, managed and optimised “Wi-Fi-first” networks that replicate the quality of experience customers are accustomed to with “fixed line” connections — clear HD voice calls, video without buffering, gaming without lag and so on — will enable MSOs to maintain customer connectivity to high-bandwidth services, providing them with a platform to monetise investments in Wi-Fi.
The Home Wi-Fi Advisor tool helps MSOs and ISPs establish a consultative relationship with the consumer, which is the first step to upselling a range of managed Wi-Fi services (such as home security and automation), ensuring the best possible customer engagement and retention.
For more information or to try XCellAir’s Whole Home Wi-Fi Advisor, please click here.
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