Breaking news: We’ve acquired XCellAir!
Today, we are delighted to announce that we have acquired XCellAir, an InterDigital Inc. company and expert in WiFi Quality of Experience (QoE). The acquisition will strengthen Fontech, our technology arm, as well as further establish our position in North America, where XCellAir’s sales and technical teams are located.
Alex Puregger, our CEO, commented on the acquisition:
So, what does this really mean for our clients?
We have been working with operators for over a decade, helping them to use WiFi to differentiate themselves within an increasingly competitive market and meet connectivity demand cost-effectively. The addition of XCellAir’s expertise and products builds on our proven ability to empower service providers to optimize available WiFi capacity to an even greater extent and improve user experience. XCellAir’s innovative technology facilitates unified management and optimization of dense WiFi and cellular network deployments for operators.
As well as welcoming XCellAir’s team of experts into the Fon family, Fontech will be incorporating XCellAir’s core product, XCellRAN™ carrier WiFi solution, into its WiFi portfolio. The powerful and elastically-scalable platform is suitable for an operator’s entire WiFi footprint as well as being compatible with any vendor equipment. Combined with our solutions, which cover every aspect of WiFi delivery from homes and workplaces to venues and public spaces, the new technology will fit seamlessly into our offering.
Taking advantage of new technologies
The passive approach of operators towards home WiFi monitoring is no longer acceptable as customers are increasingly experiencing more connectivity problems largely due to the increasing number of connected devices per household. These issues generate user frustration and result in churn. Service providers need more precise visibility about what is going on in their WiFi networks in order to ensure better troubleshooting and customer service.
XCellAir and ourselves have long been focused on developing solutions that give service providers exactly that, enabling them to offer reliable, high-performance WiFi experiences to their customers. We can’t wait to take this common vision to the next level together with XCellAir.
To strengthen our Home WiFi solution specifically, we will be incorporating the cloud-based self-organizing network (SON) and radio resource management (RMM) technologies that XCellAir have developed.
In addition to providing cellular service levels and control to WiFi networks, the technologies provide analytics and troubleshooting tools that deliver actionable insights about network and service quality for operation teams. As a result, customer support agents are armed with exceptional customer support capabilities which help reduce both churn and WiFi-related support costs.
Adlane Fellah, Senior Analyst at Maravedis, shared his perspective, “The powerful combination of better radio resource management and self-healing capabilities promises to deliver an optimal quality WiFi experience resulting in huge savings for WiFi service providers.”
Amit Agarwal, CEO of XCellAir, commented, “We are proud to have established XCellAir as a leader in the WiFi management and optimization space and, in particular, enabling operators to deliver the best home WiFi experience. The acquisition of XCellAir by Fon enables us to take the business to the next-level, immediately increasing scale and global reach.”
Strengthening efforts in a new region
Fon is a global company and we are proud to partner with clients all over the world. But we do have a natural focus on Europe, with the majority of our employees based in Spain. As an increasingly important market for us, Enrique Farfán, our COO and Managing Director in North America, recently relocated to the region and expanded our local sales team to support the company’s strategy. As well as being physically located in the region, XCellAir’s strengths lie in the North American market, so this acquisition will help us to bolster our position there.
We are really excited about this announcement and hope you are too! Make sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep up to date with all the latest news regarding this acquisition, as well as WiFi trends and opportunities, as well as other corporate news.