IOPSYS’ open-source approach to smart home Wi-Fi gateways gains traction with ISPs across the globe

In this article, Claus Hetting, CEO and Chairman of Wi-Fi NOW has interviewed Kajsa Arvidsson, CCO for IOPSYS.

IOPSYS empowers ISPs to take smart home Wi-Fi gateway (CPE) development into their own hands, decoupling Wi-Fi service delivery from proprietary software lock-ins and the rapid advance of Wi-Fi and other home broadband standards.

“In the age of chipset shortages, IOPSYS’ open-source approach based on OpenWrt* is gaining traction with ISPs all over the world,” says Kajsa Arvidsson, Chief Commercial Officer for IOPSYS

As chipset shortages continue to disrupt the smart home industry both smart home CPE vendors and ISPs are looking for new ways to reduce risks while continuing to ride the rising wave of high-value advancements in Wi-Fi technology. Striking such a balance is not easy. The right approach – says IOPSYS – is to decouple gateway development from specific platforms and then proceed to develop and deploy services from a single SDK (software development kit) point of view.

“Our experience with ISPs all over the world is that they highly value the ability to manage and evolve families of gateway products from a single, consistent software platform. When you use an open-source platform as your starting point – such as in our case OpenWrt – it means CPE developers and ISPs are better prepared for short technology lifecycles,” says Kajsa Arvidsson, Chief Commercial Officer for Sweden-based IOPSYS.

She also says that in a world where software development resources are scarce, a high-quality initial product can still be developed very quickly by leaning on the joint efforts of the OpenWrt open-source community.

“We then use our own in-house resources to develop the features and functionality that set us apart from the competition and deliver exceptional product quality,” Kajsa Arvidsson says.

The young company – founded in 2018 – is already gaining traction for its solutions landing Tier-1 ISP clients such as BT, Tele2, Telia, and Hong Kong Broadband Network, as well as CPE vendors/OEMs like Genexis, Vestel, and Heimgard, to name a few. In essence, the company’s flagship product – named IOWRT – is a software development kit (SDK) allowing ISPs and CPE vendors to build their own unified embedded software layer to match customer requirements within an OpenWrt framework.

“Delivering world-class smart home Wi-Fi services that evolve at the right pace needs the resilience afforded by open-source platforms. IOWRT is the single toolkit unifying as many as 3,500 OpenWRT software components contributed by the open-source community,” says Kajsa Arvidsson. Meanwhile IOPSYS is – of course – an active contributor to the OpenWrt open source community, she says.

IOWRT today supports a wide selection of home Wi-Fi management features including Easy Mesh™, functionality for self-organizing networks (SON), QoS and VLAN capability, Wi-Fi Data Elements™, device steering, and more. Kajsa Arvidsson says that more features are being developed for the toolbox and added as new Wi-Fi standards and functionalities are implemented by hardware vendors and as OpenWrt software libraries expand. For more details on current IOWRT specifications read here.

Kajsa Arvidsson also says among a raft of other benefits the single-platform approach facilitates and simplifies certification and testing.

“The end results is true telecom-grade solution developed and maintained at lower costs and higher ROI,” she says.

About Wi-Fi NOW:

Wi-Fi NOW sets the thought leadership agenda for the Wi-Fi industry in close cooperation with its clients & partners. They do this through their own media work as well as through press contacts. Wi-Fi NOW organizes yearly Wi-Fi industry events in the USA, Europe, and Asia and the community has more than 20,000 actively engaged Wi-Fi professionals from every segment of the Wi-Fi industry.

Don’t miss Kajsa Arvidsson and IOPSYS at The Wi-Fi World Congress Europe in Stockholm on September 26-28 – For more details and registrations click here.

 

*OpenWrt is a trademark owned by software in the Public Interest, Inc.