With the recent purchase of InterDigital’s XCellAir, European managed Wi-Fi company Fon seeks to help network operators capitalize on their Wi-Fi presence in residential homes — and get a foothold in the U.S market while they do so.
XCellAir focuses on cloud-based quality of experience management in Wi-Fi networks, including self-organizing network and radio resource management features. Financial details of the recent transaction were not disclosed. Fon has said that in addition to bringing on XCellAir’s team, it’s tech branch (Fontech) ” will be incorporating XCellAir’s core product, the XCellRAN carrier Wi-Fi solution, into its Wi-Fi portfolio. The powerful, cloud-based and scalable platform is suitable for an operator’s entire Wi-Fi footprint and for any vendor equipment, both existing deployed and next-generation WiFi access points. Combined with Fontech’s solutions that cover every aspect of WiFi delivery, from homes and workplaces to venues and public spaces, the new technology fits seamlessly into the company’s offering.”
Helping operators get a better handle on in-home Wi-Fi is part of a growing trend, with a number of vendors making recent announcements aimed at improving the overall Wi-Fi experience in the home. On the operator side, AT&T introduced in January a branded Wi-Fi extender aimed at improving in-home Wi-Fi coverage. Comcast has been rolling out advanced gateways to the home and new features for its XFi app for managing in-home Wi-Fi. In March, the cable operator added the capability for the app to generate real-time push notifications to users when a new device joins their network or if an authorized user changes the network password. Comcast said that about 15 million users have access to XFi.
OTT players like Amazon and Google have made been battling for control over increasingly smart homes with their Wi-Fi-connected Echo and Google Home virtual assistants. Michele Turner, director of Google’s smart home ecosystem, wrote in a blog entry today that the tech company’s Google Assistant now works with more than 5,000 devices — up from about 1,500 in January. She also wrote that “one of the most popular ways people use the Google Assistant in their homes is to watch movies and shows on their TV and play music. In fact, media and entertainment queries like ‘play SportCenter,’ have increased 400 percent over the past six months.” Turner also wrote that as of this month, Dish’s Hopper receivers will work with Google Assistant.
Enrique Farfán, COO of Fon, said that his company has been familiar with XCellAir for quite awhile prior to the acquisition and was impressed with its solutions.
“The main reason that prompted us to acquire them was that they have a great, complementary product to what we have traditionally at Fon,” Farfán said. “We’ve concentrated more on private Wi-Fi service management for operators. … Lately, pushed by the demand from operators, we’ve looked at extending influence inside the home.”
According to a 2017 study by XCellAir that surveyed 1,000 customers in the U.S. and U.K., about 15% of customers said they’d be willing to pay — on average, $34 per year — for their home W-Fi service to be managed by a service provider or a third party. XCellAir pegged the total revenue opportunity at $3.3 billion additional revenue in 2018, and another $3.4 billion in cost savings from reduced operating expenses if home Wi-Fi were improved to reduce complaints and truck rolls.
XCellAir’s survey also found that half of customers blamed their service provider for Wi-Fi problems, regardless of who provided their router.
The other aspect of the XCellAir acquisition, Farfán said, was that Fon “wanted to enter the North American market.”Farfán himself recently relocated to the U.S. and the company has expanded its local sales team. In announcing the purchase, Fon said that the XCellAir acquisition was “a natural move for the technology provider looking to strengthen its position within the North American market.”
“The operators are seeing a lot of players trying to get into the home,”Farfán said. And while people often think of Wi-Fi as something to be set up once and then left alone, he said, “we realize more and more that’s not the case” due to the increasing number of devices utilizing multiple frequencies.
Part of the reality to this point, he added, is that service providers in the home were limited to just having “presence” — a connectivity box. But Wi-Fi,Farfán said, is “becoming an area where there’s an opportunity for service providers to actually think of their footprint as a whole” — not just as a box in the home. “There are a large amount of products that are based on having good connectivity and bring in a lot of revenue — and service providers really don’t want to be left out. They’re trying to put out home security solutions, services around IoT — they want to play in that realm,” Farfán said. With the XCellAir acquisition and integration, Fon is hoping to help network operators and cable MSOs use managed Wi-Fi services as their springboard to additional revenue.
“We look forward to repeating our success in Europe with service providers in the U.S.,”Farfán said. “We think the market is ripe because of what’s new for operators.”
