Orange knits Mesh Wi-Fi into Belgian homes
Details
Joseph O'Halloran
| 15 April 2020

As serving Wi-Fi around the home at top levels of quality and service becomes mission critical to all operators, and made more important by the current increased amount of home working due to the Covid-19 outbreak, SoftAtHome has revealed that its technology is powering Orange Belgium’s new Mesh Wi-Fi offering.

The operator recently commissioned research that showed 90% of users consider Wi-Fi access in every room to be important or extremely important; and that 50% believe that Wi-Fi should also cover the garden a the terrace. Furthermore, given the sharp increase in home working, Orange claims that its Belgian customers have started to enjoy improved Wi-Fi performance, thanks to repeater packs, powered by SoftAtHome’s Wifi’ON, designed to extend Wi-Fi coverage by making the Wi-Fi network in the home smarter and independent of any specific gateway.

Wifi'ON Mesh Wi-Fi repeaters continuously communicate with each other with algorithms proactively deciding about the best connection for each device. Each device within the home network is directed to the best repeater and to the best Wi-Fi channel to optimise band usage according to user’s usages and to the home network load in real-time.

With quality of experience top of mind, SoftAtHome has also deployed its Eyes’ON product to manage Orange Belgium’s Mesh Wi-Fi repeaters. Eyes’ON gathers and analyses data with machine learning technologies that adapt in real-time Wi-Fi optimisation mechanisms. Eyes’ON provides actionable recommendations to Orange Belgium to improve customer experience either at home and on the move. The solution also examines the customer’s environment to provide essential information, diagnostics and guidance so that hotlines can act more rapidly and efficiently.

“We were working for several years with Orange Belgium for its set-top box offerings,” said David Viret-Lange, CEO of SoftAtHome commenting on the deployment. “We are flattered that [Orange] renewed its trust by extending its partnership to Smart Wi-Fi and Customer Experience Analytics solutions. Orange Belgium’s customers will benefit from our expertise in several European tier-one deployments for both our Eyes’ON analytics and Wifi’ON solutions.”

Added Thomas Parvais, head of product development and engineering broadband and TV at Orange Belgium: “It was key to us to satisfy their desire for a very high-speed connection at home and a seamless Wi-Fi experience. We’re delighted to reinforce our partnership with SoftAtHome. We’ve worked closely with their experts to improve algorithms, and the result is beyond expectation: our Mesh Wi-Fi combines a solution that guarantees a level of bandwidth and a powerful data analytics tool to ease our customer support in real-time.”