Fixed Wireless Access broadband to the home presents a real, substantial new revenue stream for Communications Service Providers. But delivering a reliable and high-performance FWA link to the home is only half the challenge: Ultimately, it is the in-home Wi-Fi experience that will make or break customer satisfaction. There are three components to a successful Wi-Fi service strategy.
First, there is the Wi-Fi performance itself. Unless the in-home Wi-Fi experience is both stable and stellar, operators risk frustrated customers who make lengthy help-desk calls or require an in-home technician visit to solve Wi-Fi problems. Bad Wi-Fi performance can be a huge drag on the effort and expense of a FWA service; therefore, it must be delivered as a managed service. So the software that resides on the customer gateway must be intelligent and capable enough to support self-optimization beyond that which a customer can achieve on their own.
Secondly, that Wi-Fi service must be able to be managed, remotely and from the cloud, by multiple teams within a provider. Help desk agents need complete, real-time visibility into the home network—not just the topology of the specific customer’s home network, but attached devices and traffic patterns—for those times when customers require assistance. Network administration teams, meanwhile, can use data collected from all managed Wi-Fi networks on five or 15-minutes intervals and put it to immediate use for optimization through actions that take neighboring networks into account, such as channel selection in the cloud and adjusting power transmission. The Nokia WiFi Cloud Controller enables service management to move beyond reacting to customer-identified issues; proactive troubleshooting becomes a reality. For instance, network admins can pull a ranking of 100 Wi-Fi devices that are experiencing issues such as rebooting, channel changes and the like, and use that list to solve problems before customers even call in to report them.
Thirdly, the managed Wi-Fi service can be extended with value-added services that reside on the in-home device and are managed from the cloud. The home is the ultimate edge of the network, and the combination of cloud-based access plus local computing resources on the Wi-Fi gateway opens up the possibility of monetizing new services that go beyond the broadband pipe: Security services, smart-home services, support for in-home health applications and more.
The capabilities of the Nokia WiFi Cloud Controller software mean holistic support for all of the most important aspects of a Wi-Fi service: Automation for excellent performance; effective and efficient service management; and the opportunity to deliver additional applications that deepen customer relationships. To learn more about the solution’s features, click here.
