Complexities of Home Wireless Networking Drive Demand for Wi-Fi Doctor Components & Business Models

Wi-Fi Doctor has been conceived as an application that can solve most frustrations with Wi-Fi connectivity issues and that can significantly improve the user experience of ISPs’ subscribers. Furthermore, using the service provider toolkit ISPs can enhance their technical support when addressing home Wi-Fi related issues. All this translates in satisfied customers, reduced OPEX, and a value increase of the ISP brand.

Wi-Fi Doctor Components

Wi-Fi Doctor consists of the following parts:

• A consumer application running    on client (STA) devices (smartphone, tablet, PC... supporting Android, iOS, etc.). This diagnostics tool is meant to solve end-users’ issues in a user-friendly, non-technical way
• A toolkit for service providers including:
• An application running on the gateway (AP)
• An installer tool running on installation engineers’ client devices
• A backend tool enabling additional functionalities
• Qeo, the central communication framework that makes all components talk to each other. It is installed together with the client app and is also present on the AP.

The gateway (AP) part of the app is essential and needs to be combined with either the client (STA) application (i.e. consumer and/or installer tool) or the backend, or both to obtain meaningful measurements from both ends of the wireless link and take parameters to read critical values from the wireless drivers.

Compared to the consumer app, the installer tool gives a lot more insight and diagnostics options to technical support engineers and power users.

Although the backend tool is not mandatory, some value-added features (historical data gathering, passive monitoring and self-learning) require it.

Wi-Fi Doctor Business Models

Direct-To-Consumer:

The consumer application is available free of charge but with limited functionalities for end users. It will be directly downloadable from application stores such as Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Via in-app purchase end users can get access to the full version. There won’t be any built-in limitation on the number of devices to manage, or any other kinds of restrictions on the usage of the application.[subscribe_reminder]

For Service Providers:

The gateway (AP) part of the application will be freely available to service providers for installation on their deployed gateways. However, if they want to unleash the true power of Wi-Fi® Doctor, i.e. combine the AP software with the client app and/or the backend, a fixed license fee per year applies. This yearly fee includes the installer tool as well as regular updates following the software roadmap    evolution of Wi-Fi Doctor. As regards support & maintenance, the same business model as for Technicolor gateways is implemented.

As stated above, pricing for the backend toolkit is included in the recurring fee. However, some functionality may come at a surcharge due to increased scalability requirements on the backend. Also, the yearly fee does not cover installation, material and service costs.

Technicolor understands only too well that this application also has to work on other devices besides Technicolor Gateways. To enable easy portability to other platforms, Technicolor is closely collaborating with all major SoC providers so that they can distribute Wi-Fi Doctor via their SDKs. Moreover, Technicolor has designed the AP software with a well-defined Qeo data model.

For more information on components, business models and pricing, please contact your Technicolor representative.