Nology has announced its appointment as South Africa’s official distributor of AirTies’ products. This new relationship paves the way for delivering ultra-performance, in-home WiFi to South Africa.
With Internet access services getting faster and faster, the conventional in-home WiFi architecture of a centralised access point is becoming problematic. The weakening of wireless signals through walls and floors results in degraded performance over distance, as well as Wi-Fi dead-spots. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi, which relies on a single access point (AP) from a router/gateway, AirTies’ system uses multiple APs placed around the home to create an intelligent mesh network that ensures consistent performance of high quality, whole-home Internet coverage.
Willem Venter, technical director at Nology, explains: “With the ever-increasing uptake of fibre and other high-bandwidth access mediums in the residential market, the commonly accepted in-home WiFi architecture requires a radical overhaul. Customers paying an Internet Service Provider for a 100Mbps or 1 000Mbps service expect to have proper connection speeds everywhere in the home.
“However, these customers are quickly disappointed, not by the speed the operator delivers on the gateway WAN port, but rather by the inability of the in-home WiFi infrastructure to deliver that speed to all corners of the home.
“High-speed Internet access services coupled with the insatiable need for video streaming has moved the network-bottleneck from the last mile, to the last few meters. As such, we look forward to bringing AirTies’ in-home WiFi mesh solutions to operators here across South Africa.”
“Nology clearly understands that operators in South Africa are re-thinking their approach to the whole-home experience, and that providing consistently fast Wi-Fi in every corner of the home is paramount,” says Ian Challinor, executive vice-president and GM: EMEA and APAC at Nology. “AirTies currently provides our managed mesh solution to leading operators around the globe, and we are excited about this new relationship with Nology to expand into South Africa.”
Previous attempts at solving the in-home WiFi problem include the use of Wi-Fi repeaters, but these tend to come with their own set of problems in terms of set-up and use. Using a repeater generally results in a fragmented Wi-Fi coverage where the client device (e.g. a smartphone, laptop, tablet, etc) need to exercise the decision of where to connect.
It is evident that these mobile smart devices do not make intelligent decisions when it comes to optimal connection. This often compels the home user to manually switch between WiFi networks to ensure connection to the best-performing access point.
Until now, cabling remained the only feasible alternative to carry the high speed delivered by the ISP to every other room in the home. Typically, however, little attention is paid to data cabling routes when homes are designed and built, therefore the user is left with a choice of either poor and fragmented WiFi using repeaters or drilling, chasing and general outfitting of unsightly data cables.
AirTies has solved this problem by developing a distributed mesh WiFi system in the form of a pre-paired triple-pack of Air 4920 devices specifically for the residential market. Instead of having just one router be the WiFi hub for the entire house, the AirTies triple-pack WiFi kit use multiple APs to increase coverage and performance. This allows the user to place dual-band mesh WiFi access points throughout his/her home to cover the entire premises with robust, high-performance WiFi. T
he AP’s automatically establish wireless back-haul links between one another (using super-fast 802.11ac technology) to ensure that data transmission patterns are optimised throughout the home. When and where practical, the user can also use an Ethernet cable to connect any two mesh nodes using the 1000 Mbps Ethernet ports on the back of the Air 4920. A single device option for the Air 4920 is also available and can be applied as either an extension to an existing mesh (3+1), or a stand-alone access point.
