Huw: Well, thank you for inviting me.

Huw: I think the key here is it is a big ecosystem developed by the Telecom Infra Project. They run a number of different kind of open technology projects, but OpenWiFi and Open LAN are the two that we're involved in specifically. This is a disaggregated approach to networking, which means simply separating the software from the hardware, and we play purely in the software space. So you can't buy an access point from us, for example.
 

Huw: Yes, and it's kind of essential that we do. So if you think about how this disaggregation works, it means that we have to be 100% sure that each piece of hardware that is OpenWiFi certified works with our piece of software. And the way that we do that is, as you mentioned, we have the cloud platform, and we'll speak a bit more about that to do the management and control the functionality. But NetExperience is a little bit unique in that we have two separate software development teams.

We have a development team in the cloud side, and then we have a development team purely focused on the embedded firmware inside the access points, which is a bit unusual because, of course, we don't make access points. We were an original writer of the code that is now available as open source from the TIP GitHub. Anyone can get that. And we are now also a maintainer of that code. One of the maintainers, there are other maintainers also.

What it means in practice is let's say you've done a deployment and there's an issue, that issue is going to be something NetExperience can solve because we understand the deep level firmware inside the AP as well as the cloud software and management.

Huw: The way to view this, I think, is that what we're providing is a sophisticated, highly manageable Wi-Fi solution at a low cost. I'm sure we'll talk a bit more about costs later. But the platform is a full controller platform. So that is to say it manages dense Wi-Fi. You know, think of MDUs: apartment buildings, hotels, these kind of things where you've got very dense Wi-Fi. If you let people simply plug in their own router from Best Buy, they all interfere with each other. Nobody gets good Wi-Fi. This is how we really improve that quality of experience.

Huw: This, of course, is a huge reason of the success of TIP OpenWiFi, is that what we're doing really is providing that sophisticated, manageable Wi-Fi I just described, but at a much lower cost. And the reason why is this the case, is that the manufacturers that make those access points are the Taiwanese, Chinese, Vietnamese access point vendors.

To be honest, these are the folks that make the access points for all of the traditional brands anyway, but now you've got basically a white-labeled solution from them without any markup. Again, you don't buy it from us, buy it from EPS Global, there's no markup from our side. So the hardware costs are very, very competitive, and of course, what we've done in NetExperience has made our software extremely competitive too. So overall, we reckon that you're going to pay less than 50% of what you would do from a traditional vendor.

Huw: So it's a very modern platform, as you can imagine. It is a Kubernetes cluster cloud deployment, which means it's sort of microservices-based. This means it's really scalable both horizontally and vertically, almost infinitely. So I can give you a couple of examples in terms of the scalability. We have a customer in India, in fact, the largest telco in India, that is in process of deploying not just thousands, tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of millions. So they have done that analysis, and we have done work with them to show this kind of level of scalability. So nobody needs to worry about it being scalable.

Huw: I think there's a few reasons. Certainly one of the reasons that if we go back to the pandemic a little bit was security of supply, right? And one of the things that's amazing about this technology, to be honest, is that you can mix and match different hardware in the same network. So this is unique. I mean, you try asking Cisco if you can add a Ruckus access point into their network. No. But can you add, you know, three, four, five different vendors in TIP OpenWiFi into the same network? Yes, you can. So very, very flexible from that perspective. You may, for example, say, hey, I really like this indoor access point from vendor A, but I really like this outdoor access point from vendor B. You can actually absolutely do that in an OpenWiFi.

Huw: Yeah, so this is really the sophisticated radio resource management part of the controller. If I go back to that example again of an MDU, right? If you're deploying our solution, every access point is known by the system. So each access point knows all its neighbors. This enables the access points to be very finely tuned. And this is done with some ML (machine language) or AI stuff in the engine.

But also, you can, of course, humanly do it if you want to. You can make those adjustments via a support person. But the idea is that the thing self-tunes, self-manages, and automatically provides the best possible coverage with the least possible interference. So that means end users in an apartment building are getting the best possible Wi-Fi quality they can.

Huw: So I think that's a good point. I think this is a really good selling point for anybody that's deploying in MDUs specifically. The Radius PSK, or MPSK as we call it, we actually have two flavors. The MPSK is really a methodology by which you can have in an apartment building a single SSID, and yet every apartment owner has a separate pre-shared key. So these pre-shared keys are stored inside the access points for up to 1,500 keys, or if you go beyond 1,500, you can use an external Radius server to store a larger number of keys.

What are the benefits? Well, it makes it very easy for residents to move in and out of apartment buildings. They simply get an email with an access to their Wi-Fi, and their pre-shared key, which they can change, of course. And the other thing that it does, which they find really beneficial, is that what's happening in the back end is that pre-shared key is creating a VLAN for each of those apartments. And this means that they now have a private network, a private area network.
So if they go outside their apartment and down to, say, a gym or a pool or a common area, they're still on their private network, and if they say print, they're going to print in their apartment, even though they're in the common area.

Huw: I think they're critical for anybody deploying any network. The way, of course, we follow all of the standard Wi-Fi protocols for security, the WPA2, WPA3, etc. But in addition to that, the way that this works for kind of zero-touch provisioning is that when you install an access point in a location, that access point, each of those access points has a X.509 certificate embedded within it. And of course, the cloud does too. So the authentication takes place in a very secure manner between the access points and the cloud. So all of that management and telemetry data that's being managed is secured in addition to the general Wi-Fi security.

Huw: So first of all, we don't do installation, but what we do do is networking design. So we will assist new customers. We will help them with best practices. We will help them with configurations. I mean, if you've ever configured even a medium-scale Wi-Fi network, there's a lot of little knobs you can turn. We will help them with that configuration. And I think one of the keys with our platform is once we've helped you with that configuration, it's stored in a profile. That profile can then be applied to all the other Wi-Fi access points automatically. So eliminating or vastly reducing the human error.

Huw: It's a good question. And we get asked that question also all the time. The answer is very simple. We support the whole solution. So what I mean by that, if you remember my answer right at the beginning that we had these two separate development teams, so we understand the firmware inside the access point as well as the cloud. Regardless of which access point you're using, as long as it's a TIP certified Wi-Fi access point, we will support the entire solution. So if you have a problem, something's not working right, there's a bug, something you've uncovered does happen, you don't call the access point vendor at all. You call us. We will investigate because 99.99% of problems are software, not hardware. We understand the whole software stack. We can fix that problem. If it really is a hardware problem, which is very rare, but if it is, we will triage that back with the hardware vendor.

Huw: Great.