Mariner Launches Guided Wi-Fi Workflow Solution for Field Technicians

WaveGuide provides a simple, intuitive workflow, allowing any field technician to quickly install  — and, more importantly, certify — that a new Wi-Fi install will provide the best, premium service for customers.

Mariner xVu™, the global leader in Software Defined Monitoring™ (SDM) for IP video, today announced the release of its latest groundbreaking product application, WaveGuide. Available on Google Marketplace, the app is integrated with Mariner’s award-winning xVu software platform directly out of the box.

WaveGuide provides a simple, intuitive workflow, allowing any field technician to quickly install  — and, more importantly, certify — that a new Wi-Fi install will provide the best, premium service for customers. Prior to WaveGuide, a marketplace gap existed and unreliable in-home streaming led to repeat service calls and customer care complaints, making it challenging for operators to address the rise in Wi-Fi usage and compete to offer the fastest and most reliable service.

“As the IP video market evolves, content is increasingly being viewed on multiple platforms, for more hours.Today’s homes have a growing number of devices connecting and streaming over Wi-Fi,” said Shaun MacDonald, senior vice president, business development and marketing at Mariner. “In-home streaming is dependent on Wi-Fi, and WaveGuide enables first-time-right installations and better service tracking downstream.”

WaveGuide allows a field technician to perform four workflow functions within one single app: location testing and troubleshooting, optimal access point placement, home certification, and reporting and customer sign-off.

The business benefits of WaveGuide go beyond improvements in customer satisfaction. By enabling a proper and more complete service installation and a faster more reliable workflow process, WaveGuide makes Wi-Fi commissioning efficient and cost-effective.

“WaveGuide gives technicians confidence that they are providing superior quality of service to the customer,” said Steve Copeland, vice president, product management, Mariner xVu. “Rather than relying on their own personal devices or smartphones to ‘test’ a Wi-Fi installation, WaveGuide provides assurance related to Wi-Fi service, AP placement, signal coverage, channel selection and overall installation quality at the time of the install.”

The solution is shipping today and includes the following unique features and benefits:

• Optimize access point placement – WaveGuide checks for interference, congestion and signal strength coverage around the home, finding the best location for the AP placement.
• Guided workflow – A guided drill-down approach leaves little to no interpretation of the results by the service technicians.An intuitive user interface makes the process easy.
• Self-healing – Service providers can continuously monitor the configuration and performance metrics of the in-home Wi-Fi.
• Dynamic-optimization – Intelligent algorithms analyze the current configuration against ever changing environmental factors and interferences to recommend optimal configuration.
• Shared certification records – Certification process and data collected is pushed to a central repository where it can be accessed by field technicians, care and operations groups.

Back-end integration – Integration with Mariner xVu provides service operators with a simple and scalable interface for automated data collection and correlated reporting with other devices.