Winning The Wi‑Fi Experience War

Ever wonder why your 4K stream freezes even though your plan boasts blazing speeds? We sat down at MWC with Metin from AirTies to unpack the real reason people switch broadband providers—and it’s not the price tag. Drawing on fresh survey data from the US, UK, and Japan, we dig into churn rates, intent to switch, and the number one culprit behind dissatisfaction: inconsistent user experience. From video stutter to choppy video calls, the pain points are surprisingly common, and they point straight at Wi‑Fi as the everyday bottleneck.

We break down how AirTies tackles the problem with a lightweight software agent embedded in home and small business routers, feeding real‑time performance data to a cloud platform that troubleshoots and optimizes automatically. Think channel optimization, band steering, client balancing, and policy tweaks that prioritize what people actually feel—smooth video and stable calls—over theoretical peak speeds. When software can’t fix it, the system flags precise next steps for providers, whether that’s an extender, a router swap, or a line investigation, cutting support costs and stopping churn before it happens.

The conversation also explores the messy reality inside big ISPs: multi‑vendor fleets, technical debt, and the challenge of deploying at scale. We get into why AI‑driven personalization is the next leap—networks that learn each home’s patterns and adapt on the fly without the user touching a setting. Metin shares a recent US launch of personalized Wi‑Fi with a major provider and the momentum behind smarter networks that measure success by experience, not just Mbps. If you care about reliable streaming, rock‑solid video calls, and a home network that quietly gets out of the way, this one’s for you.

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Transcript

What AirTise Actually Does

SPEAKER_00 0:01

And I'm here at MWC with Metton from AirTise. Mettin, how are you? I'm good, thank you. Great to see you again. Um, how do you describe AirTise these days to the viewers?

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Yeah, AirTise is a software company. Uh, we deliver software to um broadband service providers. We enable them to deliver smooth, smart connectivity for all of their customers. We we manage the uh home connectivity and also small business connectivity by managing the Wi-Fi, broadband connection, the router uh in that home with our cloud-based software that basically uh manages, optimizes the user experience uh while using that connectivity products.

The Real Reasons People Switch ISPs

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Fantastic. What, in your opinion, is often broken when it comes to businesses or users consuming broadband services? What are some of the gaps that service providers need to fill?

Wi‑Fi As The Bottleneck

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Yeah, that's very interesting. We have run a survey uh recently in the US, UK, and Japan uh through an independent survey company. We asked people what do they think about their internet service? Did they change their service provider recently, or are they thinking about changing their service provider and what are the reasons for that? The results were very interesting. When you ask industry, when you ask service providers, there is a big phenomenon called churn, which means some of your customers are gonna leave and you need to win new customers in order to keep your business going. And that number is quite big. And you think about uh big service providers, millions of users, they typically lose 20% of their customers every year. And then they win 20% more just to stay flat. And we asked in the US, that number came out to be like 18%. In uh UK it was 22%. Wow. Uh and that is basically what people tell us that they change their service provider. But the bigger question was are you thinking about changing your service provider now in near future? About 28% in the US says that they want to change their service provider, and more than 30% in the UK. This is very interesting. And the reasons when you ask a service provider, why do you think you lose some customers? A lot of times it's the competition, the price, uh price war between service providers. It's not the biggest reason. The biggest reason is the user experience. People change their service providers because they don't get the experience they like from their broadband service. And with the hope that they're gonna get better service from another service provider. The price was 30% of the respondents say that they changed their service provider because they got a uh cheaper offer. But about 50% is changing their service provider because they are not getting the experience they are uh they want to. And uh this is um uh in in markets where the service provider switching is easy, that's that number is big. In Japan, we found that numbers smaller, they have about 8 to 10 percent switching service providers. But when you ask them, are you happy and are you uh you want to change the service provider, there is about 25 percent. That's also quite a big number. And when we look at why people are uh having bad experience, number one complaint is uh video freezing. All of us are watching uh TV video on on our uh smart TVs or uh or Apple TV boxes or uh things like that. And we like to watch high definition video, 4K video, and we like to watch it smoothly without any interruption. That is not the case. A lot of people are complaining that when they're watching video, they have uh they have freezing, they have video quality going bad. The second big problem is calls, the internet calls we're doing video conferencing or working from home. So when you look at the speeds that are offered by service providers, fiber to the home, Wi-Fi speeds, you are talking about Wi-Fi, uh Wi-Fi 7 is everywhere, we're talking about Wi-Fi 8 coming up, there is tremendous speed that is advertised, but the user experience is not in line with those uh advertised speeds that we are getting as service. So there is more and more focus, we are seeing that where there's more and more focus on the user experience rather than the sheer speed of the internet connectivity. And that's uh that is, I would say, the biggest thing there is Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi is the bottleneck in many cases. A lot of issues people are experiencing is because of the stability of the Wi-Fi. But not only, there's also broadband connection issues. So as AirTy's, we are focusing on really understanding what users are experiencing while they're using their broadband service and identifying what the issue could be. Is it a Wi-Fi related, is it the router, or is it the broadband connection? And really telling the right recommendation to the service provider to proactively fix those issues before the customer walks away. So that's the main industry issue as far as I can see at the moment. I'm talking about fixed broadband industry. This is where we work on. And uh, yeah, so that's the thing to fix. Uh, whoever does a better job on providing a uh smoother connectivity will gain more customers.

Deploying Across Complex Networks

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Fantastic proposition. So these networks, as you know, are very complex, multi-vendor networks, a lot of technical debt and legacy systems. How do you deploy in a in this kind of very difficult environment quickly?

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Yeah, so it's uh when you look at any internet service provider, they have millions of customers, a lot of them, and and they have different types of routers that they deployed over the time. Some of them have different types of networks joined together. So it's actually there is no one size fits all type of solution. So we work with service providers to be able to integrate. We have a small piece of software that we integrate into the router that's any home user or a uh business user are using. And then that's that agent actually makes the router smarter. It collects data from that router performance data, it sends that data to cloud, and we have a large cloud software solution, which is basically monitoring all those uh homes and the uh user uh premises and making optimizations in real time. And also, if there is things that we cannot fix by software changes or parameter changes, we tell the service provider what's happening in that customer and what they need to do. Sometimes they need to replace the router, or sometimes they need to add an extender, or sometimes there's a broken uh device somewhere. So there is many different um uh cases of issues, and that really needs a smart software solution to understand what's going on and to really tell the right recommendation to the uh to the service provider.

AI‑Driven Personalized Wi‑Fi

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Fantastic. Oh, I hope my service provider is listening in Boston. I won't name them, starts with a C, but uh, we've been known to have issues, so I hope they uh are coming on board. Speaking of which, maybe talk about any news or announcements here at MWC. What's new? What's coming up? What are you excited about?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Uh we are uh we are basically showing showcasing here the new features, especially AI-driven features. Uh we have launched uh in the US, uh maybe you have seen that, an AI-driven personalized Wi-Fi solution with AT ⁇ T. And that product is in the market. And we are seeing more and more interest in smarter networks, networks understanding the uh the user needs and adapting itself to the user. So this is not very simple. This requires a very advanced uh AI infrastructure to be able to understand without user trying to configure something. We want to configure the network automatically, autonomously, uh to deliver the best user experience. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Well, what a great proposition. Thanks for joining and congratulations on all the success. All our customers out there are rooting for you. Thank you. Thanks so much.