Xirrus wants to make Wi-Fi as secure and reliable as LTE
Most of us have seen headlines that say Americans value Wi-Fi more than food, friends and sex, at least in the short term. But if you read beyond the headlines, people actually value a mobile Internet connection. That doesn’t have to be Wi-Fi, and no one is more aware of that than the companies that make Wi-Fi routers and access points. For almost a year now, they have been watching the wireless carriers prepare to move into the unlicensed spectrum band currently dominated by Wi-Fi.
Small cells that support LTE in the unlicensed 5 GHz band are set to enable wireless subscribers to stay on LTE indoors instead of moving to Wi-Fi. Consumers may end up paying for data that would otherwise be free, but enterprise users may be indifferent to the cost of their connection. That reality is creating a new pressure for makers of Wi-Fi networking gear.
“It’s really got to be a better service than LTE, otherwise people won’t use it,” said Xirrus CEO Shane Buckley. Xirrus has spent the last several years working to make its Wi-Fi service more secure through personal encryption keys and more scalable through a cloud-based delivery model.
Buckley wants enterprises to see Wi-Fi the way they currently see cellular service, as an operating expense instead of a capital investment. Some enterprise customers, like hotels and schools, work directly with Xirrus, while others will buy Wi-Fi from a cable or wireless network operator. Buckley said when hotel chains or retailers start to offer Wi-Fi in multiple locations, these companies in effect become managed service providers. His challenge is to develop a Wi-Fi service these companies will want to brand as their own.
“Wi-Fi has disappointed so much for so long that customers didn’t want to put their brand behind a solution that doesn’t work,” said Buckley, who sees security, reliability, simplicity and speed as the ways to change this perception.
Speed is not just about the user experience; it is also about the speed with which operators can deploy Wi-Fi. Xirrus said it has streamlined the activation and provisioning process within its cloud-based platform so service providers can create new customer accounts without staging networks prior to provisioning. Xirrus said its system can support an unlimited number of customer accounts and locations, and customers can drag and drop equipment that supports one customer location and move it to support another location.
“You basically have one pane of glass which the MSP connects to and then they can have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of customers that have multiple sites located anywhere in the world off one set of infrastructure,” said Buckley. “They can create multiple tenants inside our cloud for their customers and those tenants can have multiple locations inside the cloud, all of which are completely secure and separate from each other.”
Focus on security
Enterprises usually consider Wi-Fi a less secure technology than LTE, and one of Wi-Fi’s weaknesses is the fact many users often share a single password. Xirrus has tried to counter this concern with a personal encryption system, which the company says is simpler for enterprises than a virtual private network. Users create their own secure personal network that automatically encrypts their data, and enables the network to recognize them when they return to the location. Buckley said the goal is to make Wi-Fi behave more like LTE.
“Look at your phone: do you have to authenticate when you turn on your phone every time? If you go from your office to a restaurant for lunch, do you have to put in passwords or download a certificate? No, the carriers have taken all that away from you. You just turn on your phone and use it. It just works out of the box. Wi-Fi’s got to go the same way,” said Buckley.
“Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, every time we connect to public Wi-Fi we are putting our data at peril and are at risk of identify theft. Until now there hasn’t been a wireless solution to address this threat,” Buckley said.
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