Along with the new name Mojo Networks, the company formerly known as AirTight Networks announced the upcoming release of new 802.11 Wave 2 access points that use Qualcomm's VIVE solutions.
Mojo is releasing a high-performance 802.11ac Wave 2 access point in the second quarter of 2016, the Mojo C120, which uses the Qualcomm MU|EFX MU-MIMO technology. The company says the access point will deliver a price competitive cloud managed solution.
Its feature set will be specifically designed to support K-12 schools, university campus environments, distributed enterprises and large merchandise retailers that want a reliable Wi-Fi solution with a rich feature set at an attractive price, according to the company. The new features will be showcased during the National Retail Federation trade show Jan. 17-20 at Javits Convention Center in New York City.
Mojo competes with the likes of Aerohive and Meraki, which is now part of Cisco, in the cloud management space, and it in the Wi-Fi access point arena, it goes up against competitors like Aruba, now part of HP, and Ruckus Wireless.
Mojo also is launching two new cloud-management Wi-Fi packages that are designed to simplify the value proposition of its cloud solutions with all-inclusive pricing that covers the use of its 802.11ac access point hardware.
The company sells via a partner model to enterprises and that's where it's seeing a lot of growth, but it's also going to market through service providers. "This is an important sales channel for us," Mojo Networks CEO Rick Wilmer told FierceWirelessTech. Wilmer said he couldn't name any of the carriers with which it is working, as it's customary for them to not want to be publicly identified.
During an appearance at Citi's Internet, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas last week, AT&T (NYSE: T) Senior Executive Vice President of Technology and Operations John Donovan gave a glimpse of just how much the operator is involved in Wi-Fi. AT&T bulked up in Wi-Fi relatively early when it bought Wayport back in 2008. It's also deployed its own Wi-Fi on top of that.
"When you take the wireless experience, it's not just mobile, it's wireless," Donovan said. "We dispatch into homes and deploy Wi-Fi every day, we do millions of dispatches… A lot of what we do in the home is Wi-Fi related, so we have a lot of assets out there deployed in Wi-Fi."
"It's a natural for us to not only watch it, but to actively treat it as part of our experience, so it's our intention to be a lot more inclusive of Wi-Fi experience and not saying, 'that 80 percent that's Wi-Fi, that's somebody else's network problem,' because we hear about it from customers, they don't know how to turn this darn thing on, 'help me,' or they call a technician and say, 'My broadband doesn't work.' Well, you go out and find out it's a Wi-Fi problem. So we're going to organize that up and do a much better job in dealing with that experience."
For more:
- see this Mojo release
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