Plume last week introduced its self-optimizing home WiFi system. Plume adapts to the different network needs of different devices in real life and ensures that each one gets the fastest speeds possible, according to the company.
The recommended setup is one pod per room. Users simply download the Plume app for Android or iOS to activate the system.
Plume can work with users' existing routers, but the company recommends replacing them with its pods.
The pods cost $39 for now, but after the Plume pre-sale they will cost $49.
"Right now, for many of us, the bottleneck is the network,"
noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.
So how does Plume work?
Plume monitors WiFi activity through its pods, which feed the data back to the Plume Cloud.
The Cloud recognizes usage patterns across all devices and remembers daily WiFi interference behavior.
“Plume distributes the functionality of the router among multiple nodes that work together to provide connectivity, and then leverages the capabilities of bifrequency 802.11n to manage channel assignments as devices “cross” the network, using a certain amount of intermodal communication to do so.
You can do the same thing with conventional WiFi, but you leave the hopping to the wireless device to figure out.
In essence, Plume treats WiFi as a cellular network, where each pod is something like a mini-cell site.
The traffic dynamics are different than those of cellular networks, but it allows pods to cooperate in assigning the channel to move devices, and it starts to look like cell site hopping.”
Said Mike Jude, program director at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan
