Introduction

Network experts forecast that global WiFi traffic will steadily grow in the long run and it will soon exceed the fixed part of total IP traffic, reaching 49% of the global traffic by 2021. Mobile to WiFi offloading also demonstrates steady growth since mobile devices in most of the cases prefer WiFi to a mobile connection if they find a WiFi network they can connect to.

ICT service providers typically offer customers WiFi routers that connect over the access network to their network core. The overall growth of the WiFi traffic and large density of WiFi routers in urban areas will put more pressure on ICT service providers in the near future in very diverse areas ranging from technology to customer experience. Customer experience is generally considered as overall customer experience that includes every interaction of a customer with an ICT service provider such as inquires, purchases, paying bills, disputes, etc.

Most of ICT service providers have strategic plans and targets to set higher standards on the customer experience of their subscribers. Better customer experience helps to meet customers' expectations, makes them satisfied with quality of the services they receive and makes them loyal to the provider that at the end makes provider's the cash flow stable and generates additional revenue by increase in sales to existing clients and by widening of the client base - i.e. by inflow of the new customers attracted by the quality of offered services.

Customer Experience and WiFi

Issues with customers WiFi connections have a potential adversary impact the customer experience and put additional pressure on ICT service provider operational activities in a variety of different areas. If customers experience network connectivity issues with their mobile devices the first thing they typically check is their WiFi connectivity. The next step would be to contact the customer care and report the problem. A customer care agent will try to fix the problem or in more complex cases will connect the customer with the second or third lines of support. Going through all these stages of the customer support may have such a negative impact on customers experience that the customer may decide to switch provider and sign up for a competitor´s services.

Most of the customer complaints related to "Internet not working", "slow Internet" and WiFi can be generally attributed to the wireless channel that customers devices are using to communicate with the WiFi router. WiFi routers are getting more and more popular and they are widely used across the Globe. As a result of this popularity they can congest radio bands where they operate (typically 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) and this problem is becoming increasingly important in dense populated urban areas. The number of available radio channels within each band is limited by available spectrum therefore multiple Wi Fi routers of different providers must share the spectrum and co-exist with minimum possible interference with each other. This is why it is very important to select channels wisely and, thus,  provide the best possible network performance with highest possible data transfer rate with minimum connection drops. This will ultimately make positive contribution into customer experience and in the end into the provider's economic growth.

WiFi Optimization

ICT service providers need to be able to control, configure, update and troubleshoot their core and end user devices. Automatic Configuration Server/System (ACS) is one of the best scalable solutions available on the market that has capabilities and technical means to control large numbers of devices at all network levels. These capabilities also include automatic monitoring and analysis of current network environment for all controlled devices. The ACS is capable of setting all controlled devices to the channels determined as optimal based on the network environment analysis. The network analysis algorithms use data on signal strength of other devices in the network neighborhood, their noise levels, channel type/width and a few others. Obviously, data collection, aggregation and analysis of such large scale networks require for high performance monitoring solutions.

Finding an optimal radio channel for one single customer and one single Wi-Fi router is typically an easy task for the modern high-performance ACS solutions, but WiFi networks in dense populated areas require for a different approach. In such cases providers must deal with the situations when there are tens and sometimes even hundreds of WiFi routers managed by different providers, operating in close proximity and interfering with each other. This requires for a different type of algorithms for mass optimization of WiFi networks that are capable of conjugated optimization of multiple coupled and interfering WiFi routers in the scale of a residential complex building, for example.

In order to optimize such a larger WiFi network, the mass optimization algorithm must collect and analyze the network environment data from all devices in the building and set all controlled devices on the channels best for them in the terms of network performance and connections stability.

Conclusion

ICT service providers that employ novel high-performance WiFi networks monitoring and analysis solutions and provide WiFi mass optimization capabilities have great potential to improve overall customer experience by making their WiFi networks better, faster, more robust and reduce load on the customer care departments.

And at the end it makes them more sustainable and profitable on the modern highly competitive market of Internet service providers.
 

Example

AXESS is the flagship product of Axiros, for management of CPEs with Broadband Forum-compliant CWMP (TR-069) stacks but also other open management protocols. It allows for highly flexible and scalable interactions with a large number of devices for the purposes of (re-)configuration, mass firmware downloads, fault clearance and general real-time subscriber support.

AXTRACT is a high-performing monitoring solution designed to gather high-volume diagnostic data without the need to pass it through a productive third-party ACS.

AXSmart WiFi module regularly samples WiFi routers through any protocol (HTTP, SNMP, TR-069, Telnet) and collects basic statistics like traffic, errors, connected devices, channel scans, etc. Wi-Fi optimization algorithm uses both collected and historic data to provide a recommendation for WiFi router setup. Recommendations are provisioned on WiFi router using AXESS ACS.


About Axiros
The world of IoT needs control. Axiros offers control, with award-winning solutions for seamless Open Device and Service Management.

• Any device – Monitor and interact in near real-time.

• Any service – Orchestrate your Internet of Things - nearly hands-off.
  An ideal choice for service providers – and an even better one for device manufacturers or hardware suppliers with lean service organizations.

• Anywhere - Our clients have businesses around the world, and Axiros offers the best local one-stop services.

From data analysis to troubleshooting, the range of Axiros solutions distinguishes us from other global players in the market.

Axiros, the flexible partner who thinks like you think; merging people, service and equipment into the best possible IoT ecosystem for profitable growth.