The NBN Co has announced plans to add a “tool, firmware agent, or feature” to monitor selected household Wi-Fi networks to collect telemetry data to potentially provide troubleshooting for in-home internet connections.
Set to last between two and three months, the ‘Managed Wi-Fi Trial” could involve over 5000 individual users, as NBN Co hopes to find evidence that in-home wiring is the culprit for poor connection speeds.
A conclusion that was reached by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) following its testing of modems and wi-fi gateways, finding wide variations of performance capabilities across the 43 devices tested.
The NBN Co Test Agreement document issued in September outlines the purpose of test ‘is to gather insights from customers and end-users’ with the goal of identifying, diagnosing and remediating ‘wi-fi related issues in the premises’.
The document reveals the Wi-Fi test is to be “deployed on end-user premises” with participating RSPs required to nominate a gateway device that can push firmware updates during the testing period.
NBN Co told iTnews that the company has been working with retail partners to ‘test the capabilities and feasibility of the wi-fi software tool in improving connection reliability and ultimately customer experience’.
