Cecilia Ferrugia, Fontech’s sales representative in North America & the Caribbean
What’s your role at Fontech?
My name is Cecilia Farrugia, and I’m your go-to Fontech representative for the North American and Caribbean markets. There are many, many opportunities here for WiFI, and I’d be happy to talk to you about them. I’m based in the United States, in Miami.
What can you tell us about the current WiFi ecosystem in North America and the Caribbean?
The North American telco market is highly developed, converged, and there are a huge number of players involved, where M&A activities are frequent and relevant.
The market is experiencing strong OTT disruption, high multi-device data demands, and exponential growth of unlimited plans. This creates a drive for fixed operators to mobilize their offerings to gain relevancy and retain customers, and mobile operators to seek network/spectrum efficiencies. WiFi service management and service offerings are also gaining momentum due to the high level of convergence and service bundling in this market.
In regard to the Caribbean, there’s a strong demand for WiFi services coming from the tourism sector, and from home users who are looking for improved coverage that extends beyond simple ‘best efforts’. This opens the door to possibilities for offering services like safe and secure guest WiFi as well as to providing a cost-effective approach to improving home WiFi.
What can Fontech offer to North America and the Caribbean region?
Fontech provides solutions for service providers to coherently manage their WiFi networks. This enables them to leverage their existing deployments while positioning them for future trends such as the IoT wave. In this highly saturated and developed market, operators are seeking ways to differentiate from competitors apart from price, as well as ways to meet increasing data demands cost-effectively. In this context, two of our solutions are well positioned:
Our Carrier WiFi Solution allows operators to offer WiFi access based services. By integrating WiFi into existing BSS/OSS system the solution guarantees a centralized management and operational efficiency. This solution allows operators to offer a holistic proposition regardless of the access technology, to implement offload strategies, to improve and further penetrate the SMB markets and to differentiate from competitors through WiFi based value-added services. In fact, these services have a proven positive impact on churn reduction by 15-20%.
When it comes to cable or FTTH providers, our Home WiFi Solution helps decrease expensive, WiFi-related technical support costs and significantly increases NPS. This solution allows operators to improve their home WiFi coverage and connectivity experience. And unlike other OTT solutions in the market, it is built for operators to maintain full visibility and control over the service.
When we look at targeting the business segment, there are two other solutions key for SPs searching for new revenue sources and for ways to deepen their engagement with clients.
The first one is our well-known Guest WiFi solution. This solution is key not only for those high tourist destinations I mentioned before but also for SMBs who want to offer WiFi services to visitors.
And finally, our Enterprise Control Solution provides enterprises with the tools to centrally control and manage the security of their private wireless networks. Among other functionalities enables an easy self-onboarding of the employees, management of policies, users, and devices.
I’d be delighted to talk to you about how our WiFi solutions can really help you take your strategy to the next level. Please get in touch if you’d be interested in hearing more! And make sure you follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to be the first to know about exciting future announcements!