Over the next five weeks, we will be bringing you a five-part series on the emerging new battle ground for Service Providers; home WiFi. This series will examine the critical importance of home WiFi in product strategic planning and how it is transforming our business. Please follow us on LinkedIn to get every article in the series.
The battle is raging for WiFi dominance in the subscribers’ home as service providers are at a crossroads: adopt transformative WiFi strategies or risk being left behind. To gain an edge over the competition, service providers must address the variety of complex challenges that exist for home WiFi. Demand for WiFi performance is changing as more and more people are adding connected devices to their WiFi environment, working remotely, virtually learning, and streaming video. In short, the home has become more WiFi centric than ever. Service providers are challenged to not only keep up with these changes in demand, but also work to implement strategies that create long term service success. Throughout this five-part series, we will be talking about the transformative effects of home WiFi demands on service providers and will examine cost saving and monetization opportunities. Today’s topic: the importance of harnessing Cloud intelligence to transform your home WiFi offering.
The Challenges Facing Service Providers Today
In addition to maintaining current network functionality, service providers are faced with several major challenges that impact the provider’s long-term service viability.
Siloed Legacy Systems Preventing Data Insights:
Home WiFi is increasingly complex with subscribers connecting a variety of devices to the network. For service providers, siloed, legacy backend systems prevent gathering of data insights on home WiFi and present a real challenge to obtain the information they need to service their customers. Service providers struggle to draw valuable insights from the data that they collect, and as a result, struggle to make vital business decisions. Most service providers are sitting on vast amounts of data. Those that can harness it effectively can gain a much deeper understanding of their customers, make better forecasts, improve and personalize services and the customer experience, creating stronger brand loyalty and repeat business. Addressing data management shortcomings needs to be a priority for service providers looking to deliver a positive customer experience and to expand their value-add services.
Cloud-based platforms can help provide the infrastructure needed to collect, process and analyze data from across the organization and make it actionable in real time and to achieve the competitive advantage they seek.
Faster to Market :
Building value-add products and service to your home WiFi product portfolio doesn’t matter if you can’t get it to market before your competition does. No one wants to hand over revenue to their competitor, and that’s why it’s imperative to have the right tools. A Cloud-based platform can exponentially accelerate your deployment process, resulting in faster-to-market, new revenue streams while lowering capital and operational costs. A Cloud-based solution is a go-to business strategy that gives service providers increased flexibility for upscaling or downscaling and removes barriers to limited resources. Deploying new services from and in the cloud is faster than developing and deploying on legacy systems and hardware, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional architectures, giving you a distinct competitive advantage by being faster to market.
Visibility into the Customer Premise:
As a service provider, you’re already paying for home networking support to answer customer calls related to WiFi issues. Often, the multitude of legacy systems and applications that have to be swiveled between to gather customer information and to pin point the home networking issue, makes it challenging to make an informed decision on how to solve the customers’ issue. A cloud-based, centralized, automated and hardware agnostic solution can provide your Support Technicians with visibility into the home network to remotely view, configure, and manage connected network Gateways and devices, resulting in faster troubleshooting, smarter decisions around solutions, and saving unnecessary truck dispatches. Cloud-based WiFi management platforms can offer visibility into the home network, remote self-serve and self-healing networks, data intelligence in the cloud, security protection in the cloud and the Gateway via cloud Agent. Technicians can use this view to remotely access networked devices, troubleshoot and even update firmware for security. Layer on top of this, a hardware agnostic Cloud Agent that resides on the customer Gateway, enabling zero-touch deployment, data gathering and analysis, intelligent network performance with machine learning and artificial intelligence.
All three of these factors play a major role in the future success of the service provider. While complex problems often require complex solutions, those solutions are often costly and represent a band aid fix rather than a solution that evolves with service provider’s business goals. Instead, service providers can turn to a smarter all-in-one solution to address these issues and benefit from the cost savings monetization opportunities.
The Answer is in the Cloud
Cloud-based WiFi management is an essential addition to a service provider’s array of network management tools. The right cloud-based WiFi management platform can address all current challenges while establishing the provider for future success.
Cloud-based WiFi management platforms such as Optim WiFi Management, are designed in a way that makes it easy for service providers to manage cloud-hosted home gateways. By centralizing home gateway functions into the cloud, service providers are granted more control and provided with more flexibility when deploying new services or updates. By virtualizing residential gateways, service providers can quickly and efficiently implement new services to their subscribers, improving network experiences and building a reputation for innovation and reliability.
There are a variety of Cloud-based network management solutions available to service providers, each with their own specific offerings. Many of these tools offer selective services, add on services or other expensive additions that make them costly to implement. For a truly all-in-one Cloud-based WiFi management tool, turn to Optim.
Coming up next week, part two of the series Home WiFi Battleground for Service Providers: IoT Protection.
Optim has been deployed to over 5 million homes as the first managed WiFi and service level platform. Service Providers wanting to learn more about Optim’s home networking and data management tools, should contact us today.
