By Keith Waldorf, VP Engineering
For the last several years, iPass has been on a mission to grow it’s global WiFi footprint. Being Everywhere, as in 50 Million global hotspots, is a key component of the company’s new direction and critical to the company’s success. But what does Everywhere really mean? And more importantly, what does Everywhere mean to the people, devices, and things that use our service?
As I took on the role as VP of Engineering in May of 2015, we had just defined the strategy of Unlimited, Everywhere, and Invisible. Taking our lead from the new management team, engineering and product began evaluating what Everywhere and Invisible meant and how we could leverage our platform to improve the iPass service offering to support these initiatives. We began to question what is more important than growing our footprint and how do we add value being Invisible, seamlessly running in the background, if we’re not Everywhere? In the end, the answer was simple.
Coming to a location near you
We need to be Everywhere to be Invisible, and to be Everywhere, we need to grow near our customers, wherever they may go. It’s not necessarily about the number of WiFi hotspots as much as it is in being able to intelligently connect where and when our customers need access. 50+ Million global hotspots allows us to provide access and opportunity for our partners and customers to connect in hunderds of countries around the world. But customers/devices that never travel outside of the continental U.S. won’t perceive any value in iPass growing footprint in China. What matters most to our customers is that they can connect, and stay connected.
Just connect me
What came out of these conversations is the beginning of our Connection Intelligence platform. The technologies behind the platform are in production today and some were patented by iPass as far back as 2001. By leveraging advanced analytics, and a large historical sample of network connection statistics to provide real-time connections success metrics, we can now make smarter decisions on where to add footprint, when and where to connect our customers, plus much more…
Over the coming weeks, iPass will be launching several new products that will dramatically improve connection success, security, and connectivity near our users.
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