Wi-Fi Easy Connect™ and Wi-Fi EasyMesh™ evolve to drive superior home Wi-Fi experience
Austin, Texas – February 4, 2021 – Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Easy Connect™ and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED EasyMesh™ now deliver more secure, smart, and efficient Wi-Fi® home networks. New features available for Wi-Fi Easy Connect™ now enable zero touch, secure provisioning of devices onto home networks, while additions to Wi-Fi EasyMesh™ increase Wi-Fi network capacity, support more simultaneous services, and deliver end-to-end service prioritization. New advancements now available for each program deliver benefits to users and service providers, while home Wi-Fi networks supporting both Wi-Fi Easy Connect and Wi-Fi EasyMesh establish smarter networks that are interoperable, secure, easy to set up, flexible, and extend high quality Wi-Fi throughout the home.
“Today’s homes are built on Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ continually progresses to deliver more advanced Wi-Fi networks that meet the needs of increasingly diverse devices and services,” said Kevin Robinson, senior vice president of marketing, Wi-Fi Alliance. “By making it easier to set up and manage Wi-Fi networks, while still supporting strong security and ensuring consistent home coverage, Wi-Fi is helping to advance the connected home experience.”
Wi-Fi Easy Connect simplifies the process of adding Wi-Fi devices with limited or no display interface – such as smart doorbells, lightbulbs, or smoke detectors– to both home and enterprise Wi-Fi networks, while supporting advanced WPA3™ security. New features available for Wi-Fi Easy Connect enable simple and flexible network authentication and onboarding, and introduce two new onboarding and configuration methods: zero touch cloud-based technology or Near Field Communication (NFC) tag. Onboarding by scanning the quick response (QR) code is still available. The easy process allows devices to gain secure network access using the latest security protocols, and devices will remain configured when there is a change to network settings, including a change in SSID. Based on public-key cryptography, Wi-Fi Easy Connect provides the ability to strongly authenticate and manage individual devices on the network and enforce network security policies on an individual device basis.
Wi-Fi EasyMesh networks employ multiple access points working together to form a unified mesh network that provides smart, high-performance Wi-Fi coverage throughout the home. With support for Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi EasyMesh extends the latest generation of Wi-Fi throughout the home and delivers greater capacity, reduced latency, and advanced features to support more simultaneous services and applications. Wi-Fi EasyMesh supports configuration of traffic prioritization policies for improved experiences in low latency applications – such as ensuring real-time, interactive video display is not impacted by less time-sensitive applications. Wi-Fi EasyMesh provides enhanced diagnostics and metrics with full support for Wi-Fi Data Elements™, enabling service providers to more proactively identify and resolve Wi-Fi network issues. Wi-Fi EasyMesh can also leverage Wi-Fi Easy Connect for user-friendly onboarding of additional access points to further extend home network coverage where it is needed.
Wi-Fi Easy Connect and Wi-Fi EasyMesh reduce complexity of Wi-Fi home networks, improve security and network management capabilities, and drive a better experience for a variety of home Wi-Fi applications and services. For more information please visit: https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-easy-connect and https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-easymesh.
Industry support for Wi-Fi Easy Connect and Wi-Fi EasyMesh:
“Proliferation of Wi-Fi EasyMesh devices ensures interoperability for a multi-vendor Wi-Fi infrastructure at home. With our EQUIPE and CloudCheck product lines, we heavily invest in the future of mesh networking and are proud to contribute to Wi-Fi EasyMesh standards development in Wi-Fi Alliance.” – Tuncay Cil, Chief Strategy Officer, ASSIA
“This release of Wi-Fi EasyMesh and Wi-Fi Easy Connect focuses on securing the Connected Home experience, making it easy for end-users to connect their devices and self-install APs to improve their Wi-Fi coverage. CableLabs was happy to contribute to the development of these programs because they allow our members to proactively manage their networks using Wi-Fi Data Elements and provide a resilient in-home connectivity experience.” – Darshak Thakore, Principal Architect at CableLabs
“As one of the original contributors to the Wi-Fi Easy Connect and Wi-Fi EasyMesh specifications, CommScope fully supports the continued evolution of these programs to make it easy as possible for consumers to get the vital services they need for their digital lives from the Wi-Fi home. The goal of these two programs aligns with CommScope’s own goal of seamless onboarding of Wi-Fi devices in the home, as well as the ability to introduce multi-vendor meshing access points into the home ecosystem for both consumer retail investment and service provider driven solutions.” – Charles Cheevers, CTO, Home Networks, CommScope
“As one of the companies on multiple Wi-Fi EasyMesh test beds, MediaTek continues to offer support and technical expertise to Wi-Fi Alliance as it advances industry Wi-Fi standards. MediaTek’s chipsets have a long history of supporting Wi-Fi EasyMesh capabilities. Our close cooperation with Wi-Fi Alliance strengthens MediaTek’s position as a distinguished provider of Wi-Fi solutions, delivering the best connected experiences for everyone.” – Alan Hsu, Corporate Vice President at MediaTek
“Standards-based technologies for simply and securely on-boarding devices, while supporting peak performance across today's popular mesh-style networks, are imperative given today's massive acceleration in Wi-Fi demand. Qualcomm Technologies has long been committed to driving seamless and immersive experiences, with a pioneering history of advancing mesh networking and solving complex provisioning challenges, and we look forward to continued support of Wi-Fi Easy Connect and Wi-Fi EasyMesh across our Wi-Fi product portfolio." – Rahul Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Connectivity and Networking, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
About Wi-Fi Alliance®
www.wi-fi.org
Wi-Fi Alliance® is the worldwide network of companies that brings you Wi-Fi®. Members of our collaboration forum come together from across the Wi-Fi ecosystem with the shared vision to connect everyone and everything, everywhere, while providing the best possible user experience. Since 2000, Wi-Fi Alliance has completed more than 65,000 Wi-Fi certifications. The Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ seal of approval designates products with proven interoperability, backward compatibility, and the highest industry-standard security protections in place. Today, Wi-Fi carries more than half of the internet’s traffic in an ever-expanding variety of applications. Wi-Fi Alliance continues to drive the adoption and evolution of Wi-Fi, which billions of people rely on every day.
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Media Contact:
Stephanie Burke
Highwire PR for Wi-Fi Alliance
wi-fi@highwirepr.com