Plume, Broadcom announce development and distribution collaboration, launch cloud driven features

Plume Design and Broadcom announced on Tuesday technology development and distribution collaboration, and new interference mitigation techniques uniquely enabled by the Broadcom Air-IQ and ZeroWaitDFS features. Available through the Plume Adaptive WiFi Cloud Control and Management Platform, these advanced features are sophisticated interference mitigation and channel selection techniques available in the industry.

The cooperation between Broadcom and Plume also encompasses pre-integration of the Plume Agent onto a broad range of Broadcom silicon platforms for xPON, xDSL, Wi-Fi router and range extenders including those incorporating the new Max Wi-Fi 11ax ecosystem – which includes the flagship BCM43684 802.11ax solution targeted for the residential Wi-Fi market.

The Air-IQ feature from Broadcom can scan and identify the sources of both Wi-Fi and non-Wi-Fi sources of interference, serving not only as a fast, additional trigger and input for cloud based performance optimizations, but also as a powerful support tool for carriers in identifying the specific causes of performance degradation with finer granularity. Broadcom’s novel ZeroWaitDFS solution is integrated into Plume’s channel management algorithms to unlock the potential of the high speed 5GHz DFS channels.

In addition to Air-IQ and ZeroWaitDFS assisted interference mitigation and channel selection, the Plume Adaptive WiFi platform performs joint optimizations across multiple apartments in MDU environments, tightly coupled band and client steering across the carrier gateway Wi-Fi and distributed extender APs, back-haul link selection, and channel assignment and optimization in multi-AP whole-home environments using Plume’s novel Auto-Channel-Hop technology.

Plume’s Adaptive WiFi also provides sticky client resolution, dynamic load balancing, and predictive, preemptive, and client specific optimizations based on device behavior and historical patterns. Internet Service Provider (ISP) operational support and provisioning functions are provided by the cloud platform through Network Operation Center (NOC) and customer support interfaces, inventory management, and lead generation tools.

“Measuring by the huge sums of money mobile broadband operators pay for small slivers of licensed wireless spectrum just to avoid interference, there’s trillions of dollars of value in the ultra-wide, unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum; if, and only if, one could deal with the complex challenges of providing an equivalent quality of user experience,” commented Fahri Diner, CEO and co-founder of Plume.

“Unlocking this inherent value requires two fundamental innovations – highly advanced techniques to dynamically manage the unlicensed spectrum for interference mitigation across time and space; and a massively scalable, cloud based unified control plane which can look across multiple hardware platforms to perform joint optimizations of all parameters in heterogeneous carrier network environments,” continued Diner. “This is precisely the reason why we’re so enthusiastic about our collaboration with Broadcom.”

“Carriers globally are continually pushing the performance envelope for their in-home Wi-Fi deployments,” said Greg Fischer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Broadband Carrier Access Products Division at Broadcom. “The tight integration of Air-IQ and ZeroWaitDFS features with Plume’s unified Wi-Fi control platform enables a unique and powerful value proposition which allows service providers to improve Wi-Fi capacity, speed, reliability and resiliency while lowering total cost of ownership of both single-AP and multi-AP Wi-Fi deployments,” added Fischer.

“We are thrilled about these new set of features on the Plume – Broadcom platform,” said Ahmed Selmani, Deputy CEO of Sagemcom Broadband SAS. “Sophisticated detection and mitigation of interference coming from both Wi-Fi and non-Wi-Fi sources, as well as coordinated access to a broad set of Wi-Fi DFS frequencies are becoming key requirements for our customers,” Selmani continued.


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