For a while, many believed working from home was temporary. Today, it’s simply how millions of people work, day in and day out.
The home has become an office, a classroom, an entertainment hub, and increasingly, a place where AI-powered tools are becoming part of the daily workflow. That evolution is changing what subscribers expect from their broadband experience.
In my latest byline for Broadband Breakfast, I explored new research from Plume showing how work-from-home habits continue to shape broadband usage and what that means for Internet Service Providers. The findings reinforce a simple reality: subscribers no longer judge their broadband service by speed alone. They judge it by whether it keeps them productive, connected, and uninterrupted throughout the day.
When working from home first became widespread, much of the industry’s attention focused on bandwidth.
Could networks handle the demand?
Would upload speeds be sufficient?
How much capacity would households need?
Those were important questions; today’s questions are different.
Can a video meeting remain stable while someone else is streaming?
Can AI applications respond instantly and successfully?
Can multiple users work, learn, and collaborate simultaneously without noticing the network at all?
The conversation has shifted from delivering connectivity to delivering confidence.
Our recent research with Parks Associates shows that subscriber expectations continue to evolve.
People rarely celebrate a faster speed test. They notice a frozen video call, poor audio quality, or an unresponsive app when they need it most.
That’s why the industry’s focus is expanding beyond throughput to Quality of Outcome (QoO). Success isn’t measured by how fast the network is in ideal conditions. It’s measured by whether subscribers can accomplish what they set out to do.
For remote workers, that outcome might be leading a customer presentation without interruption.
For someone using AI throughout the day, it might be receiving responses instantly enough to stay productive.
For families, it means all of those experiences happening simultaneously.
The next generation of work-from-home applications won’t simply consume bandwidth.
They’ll depend on low latency, consistent performance, intelligent traffic management, and continuous optimization.
As AI assistants become integrated into everyday workflows, subscribers will expect networks to adapt automatically to changing conditions.
Meeting those expectations requires more than additional capacity.
It requires intelligence.
Every connected home is different: The number of users changes. The devices change. Applications compete for network resources in different ways throughout the day.
Delivering a consistently great experience increasingly depends on understanding those changing conditions and adapting in real time.
That’s where orchestration becomes critical.
By continuously learning across more than 600 million connected devices, over 50 million homes, 450+ ISP partners, and 58 countries, Plume can recognize patterns that individual networks cannot. Those insights help providers optimize performance proactively rather than reacting after subscribers experience problems.
The biggest takeaway from this research isn’t that people are still working from home.
It’s that work from home has fundamentally changed what subscribers expect from broadband.
The providers that succeed won’t simply offer faster connections; they’ll deliver networks that are reliable, intelligent, and able to adapt to the realities of modern digital life.
For a deeper look at the research and what it means for broadband providers, I encourage you to read my full article in Broadband Breakfast.
Read the full byline: What ISPs Need to Know About Work-From-Home Habits.
Part One of this research paper covers the technical investigation: how the infection works, how Popanet operates and what traffic flows through subscriber homes without their knowledge or consent. Part 2 will examine how different types of malware are exploiting the presence of already-deployed proxies on these devices. All indicators of compromise are published on Plume Security Lab’s GitHub.
Subscribers buying a SuperBox believe they are paying for content. What they are also buying, without knowing it, is a permanent seat on someone else’s network.
For years, the broadband industry competed on speed.
Faster tiers, faster downloads, faster networks.
Then the conversation shifted to Quality of Experience (QoE), recognizing that subscribers care about how their connection performs, not just how fast it is.
The AI era demands another evolution: Quality of Outcome (QoO).
Increasingly, subscribers don’t judge broadband by speed or even connection quality. They judge it by whether they can successfully accomplish what they set out to do. Can they complete the video call? Finish the AI-assisted task? Stream the match without interruption? Secure their connected home without thinking about it?
At the same time, AI is reshaping how people use their home networks. From intelligent assistants and connected security to emerging agentic workflows, the connected home is becoming more dynamic, more personalized, and more dependent on reliable connectivity than ever before.
Plume’s latest research, developed with Parks Associates, explores how AI is redefining what subscribers value most and where providers can create lasting competitive advantage. Our joint whitepaper, Owning the Broadband Subscriber Experience in the AI Era, explores these trends in depth; five ideas stand out to me as particularly important for ISP leaders.
Consumers rarely judge their provider based on a speed test alone.
They judge it by whether video calls stay connected, gaming sessions remain responsive, smart home devices work reliably, and support is given before frustration sets in.
Research from Plume and Parks Associates reinforces this shift, showing that service quality, including Wi-Fi performance and customer experience, has a direct impact on satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, and churn. As performance deltas between providers continue to narrow, not just experience but Quality of Outcome becomes the defining competitive advantage.
AI has quickly become central to conversations across every industry.
But in broadband, intelligence doesn’t come from algorithms alone. It comes from the quality, diversity, and scale of the data used to train them.
This is where platform scale matters.
Every day, Plume’s AI-native platform learns from more than 500 million connected devices, 50 million homes, 450+ ISP partners, and deployments spanning 58 countries. That global intelligence enables pattern recognition no individual operator could develop in isolation.
The value isn’t simply having more data. It’s learning across millions of real-world environments to continuously improve the subscriber experience for every ISP we serve.
Collecting insights is only the beginning.
The real opportunity lies in turning intelligence into action.
That means identifying problems before subscribers notice them. Optimizing performance automatically. Personalizing support based on what’s happening inside the connected home. Helping subscribers stay protected without requiring them to become network experts.
This orchestration layer is becoming one of the most important strategic assets for ISPs. It connects network intelligence, customer care, cybersecurity, and automation into a single, continuously improving experience.
Ultimately, subscribers don’t evaluate each of those capabilities separately.
They simply ask whether their internet works, or, more so, whether they can easily complete all of the tasks they rely on their internet for.
Consumers no longer compare broadband providers solely against other broadband providers.
They compare every digital experience against the best experiences they have anywhere.
Streaming platforms anticipate what they’ll watch next. Navigation apps reroute around traffic automatically. AI assistants increasingly complete tasks with little human intervention.
Broadband is moving in the same direction.
Subscribers will increasingly expect their provider to anticipate issues, resolve problems proactively, and deliver personalized experiences without requiring them to call support.
The future belongs to providers that make complexity invisible.
The most successful providers won’t simply deploy AI.
They’ll use AI to strengthen trust.
That means understanding each household more deeply, reducing friction throughout the subscriber lifecycle, protecting increasingly connected homes, and delivering experiences that feel effortless.
AI isn’t replacing the relationship between ISPs and subscribers.
It’s creating an opportunity to make that relationship stronger than ever.
One idea surfaced repeatedly throughout our joint research:
The next phase of broadband competition won’t be won by delivering more connectivity. It will be won by delivering better outcomes.
For ISPs, that means moving beyond reactive support and embracing intelligent orchestration across the entire subscriber experience.
It also means recognizing that data becomes a competitive advantage only when it’s translated into action.
That’s where AI, global intelligence, and orchestration come together, not simply to optimize networks, but to help providers build stronger customer relationships, improve operational efficiency, and create subscriber experiences that stand apart.
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, I invite you to read the full whitepaper, Owning the Broadband Subscriber Experience in the AI Era, developed in partnership with Parks Associates.
Fully certified Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn) routers and consumer devices are expected to be officially finalized and certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance in 2028. However, early pre-standard hardware (draft-compliant with basic capabilities) is already hitting the market. For instance, manufacturers like TP-Link have announced plans to launch the TP-Link Archer 8 router as soon as October 2026.
Wi-Fi 8 (IEEE 802.11bn) marks a turning point. For the first time, a Wi-Fi generation optimizes for reliability rather than peak speed, targeting a 25% improvement in throughput under interference, a 25% reduction in 95th percentile latency, and a 25% reduction in packet loss as users move through the home. These are the right goals, and Plume welcomes them. Plume has been delivering these outcomes for over a decade across every device already in the home. When Wi-Fi 8 arrives, Plume will orchestrate its already outstanding capabilities on top of it. This is Plume and Wi-Fi 8 together, not one or the other.
Plume delivers the outcomes Wi-Fi 8 targets across the Wi-Fi generations people own today.
Wi-Fi 8’s alleged reliability gains come largely from coordination and intelligence: choosing the best channel, steering clients to the right band and access point (AP), prioritizing the right application, and avoiding interference. Since these decisions sit above the radio, Plume already makes them in the cloud for Wi-Fi 5, 6, 6E, and 7 devices now, and will continue to adhere to this strategy for Wi-Fi 8 silicon when it comes to market. Plume does not raise a device’s physical ceiling. A Wi-Fi 5 client maintains its peak rate. What Plume does is work every device as close to that ceiling as conditions allow, and keeps the whole-home experience consistent across a mixed fleet. This matters because the installed base lags the standard by years: as of November 2025 only 2% of connected devices are Wi-Fi 7 capable (WBA), the Wi-Fi Alliance expects just 15% of the 3.9 billion devices shipping in 2025 to support Wi-Fi 7, only 1.29% of devices in Plume trials support MLO, and the majority of devices Plume manages today still run Wi-Fi 5, a 2013 standard. Some Wi-Fi 8 mechanisms remain device-resident, such as HARQ and MLO, and Plume orchestrates those as the hardware lands.
On identical silicon, Plume delivers a measurably better experience.
In recent internal Wi-Fi 7 competitive testing against two leading mesh systems built on the same Qualcomm chipset, with six clients running at once, Plume scored 93.3% across the test suite versus 46.2% and 51.8%, roughly twice the nearest competitor. Plume kept roaming handoffs under the 300ms threshold that ensures they are invisible to users, whereas the two competing systems took around 8 and over 90 seconds, respectively. Plume moved a sticky client to a better access point in about 70 seconds, while one competitor never moved it and the other took 17 minutes to do so. Plume detected and avoided interference in roughly 10 minutes, whereas both competitors showed no response after 30 minutes. Finally, Plume delivered 194% more throughput to the worst-served client in the home. Same hardware, very different experience. The difference is orchestration, not the radio.
Side-by-side CPE testing results available upon request.
Rolling out Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8 still requires Plume on top.
Wi-Fi 8 ships mechanisms, not the decisions that all but ensure a good experience. Choosing the channel, steering the client, prioritizing the application, and coordinating across access points all require an intelligence layer above the radio. That layer will be required even inside a fully Wi-Fi 8-installed home, and it has to work across the different vendors, chipsets, and platforms that a real home accumulates over time, which the new standard’s coordination features do not. Plume is, and has long been, that layer. Driven by cloud-scale telemetry rather than per-AP heuristics, and unified across hardware through OpenSync, RDK-B, and OpenWRT, the mixed installed base makes this urgent rather than eventual: homes will run Wi-Fi 5, 6, 6E, 7, and 8 side by side for years, with meaningful Wi-Fi 8 adoption not expected before 2028.
Newer standards raise the hardware burden. Plume softens it.
Each Wi-Fi generation requires more access points to cover the same home area because higher modulation schemes, such as 4096-QAM, and higher frequencies, such as 6 GHz, penetrate walls less effectively. More APs also mean more capital expenditure and more coordination complexity. Plume offsets this inevitability by shifting core capabilities to the cloud, improving performance through adaptive intelligence rather than another hardware refresh, and automating the onboarding, configuration, and troubleshooting that managing a denser mesh would otherwise require.
Augment your Wi-Fi–and your subscriber experience–with Plume.
Beyond the Wi-Fi standard, Plume’s deeper differentiator is data. It runs optimizations using telemetry from over 500 million devices across more than 50 million homes, 70,000 device types, and the top 3,000 applications, with 90% of devices identified within 1-2 minutes at the model level, all on a single data fabric and a single source of truth rather than a stack of siloed tools. That data feeds three platform pillars: Intelligence, Orchestration, and Engagement. It is why Plume is the trusted platform for over 450 ISPs worldwide. With security, parental controls, operational tooling, and monetization all on the same platform, it is the perfect enhancer to standard Wi-Fi optimization. Underpinning it all is Quality of Outcome (QoO), which estimates the likelihood that the application a subscriber is using will deliver the outcome they expect and drives real-time adaptations toward it, across every Wi-Fi generation in the home.
It shows up on the operator’s P&L.
Subscribers will not read a Wi-Fi spec, but they will notice when the video call drops, and call support when it does. Every support call carries a cost, every truck roll a larger one, and every churn event carries the highest cost of all. By getting ahead of the small failures that erode confidence over months, Plume turns fewer interference events into fewer dropped calls, fewer dropped calls into fewer tickets, and better in-home visibility into faster, cheaper resolution when a ticket does arrive.
In short: Wi-Fi 8 strengthens the foundation. Plume turns that foundation into a consistent, reliable, and intelligent whole-home experience; directly affecting ISPs’ P&L.
Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be) introduced Extremely High Throughput (EHT) mode, which focuses on maximizing raw data rates through wider channels, higher modulation, and multi-link operation. Wi-Fi 8 (IEEE 802.11bn), by contrast, introduces Ultra-High Reliability (UHR) mode. That shift captures the core difference between the two standards: while Wi-Fi 7 pushes theoretical throughput to its limits, Wi-Fi 8 is designed to ensure consistent, predictable performance in everyday environments where interference or congestion affects wireless quality. It is probably the first Wi-Fi generation whose main objective is not higher peak speed but reliability, targeting a 25% improvement in throughput under interference, a 25% reduction in 95-percentile latency, and a 25% reduction in packet loss when users move throughout the home and in areas where the signal is weak compared to Wi-Fi 7.
Plume embraces this shift because the challenge with Wi-Fi has never been maximum data rate (peak throughput); it’s what happens when conditions are imperfect, which is the reality in most homes. This is the problem Plume has been addressing since its inception. Long gone are the times when a single gateway is enough for every home. Wi-Fi 7 already requires a denser mesh system to cover the home due to extremely high modulation (up to 4096-QAM) and weaker penetration at higher frequencies like 6 GHz, which calls for more advanced coordination to manage effectively. That advanced coordination, together with multi-vendor hardware abstraction, AI-powered device and application intelligence, cloud-based optimization across every Wi-Fi generation, and the back-office tools that enable Care, NOC, onboarding, security, and day-to-day operational excellence, is what Plume delivers to service providers.
Wi-Fi 8 strengthens the foundation, but Plume uses it to deliver a consistently reliable end-user experience.
Wi-Fi 8 also brings a set of physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC) evolutions to bear:
In contrast, Plume has built a cloud-based, adaptive Wi-Fi platform that seeks to achieve many of the same end goals as Wi-Fi 8, regardless of the Wi-Fi version running on the device. Even when Wi-Fi 8 launches, it will take years for the device ecosystem to catch up, and real homes will continue to contain a mix of Wi-Fi 5/6/7/8 clients for the foreseeable future. At Plume, we push the intelligence to the cloud so even older devices can benefit from many incremental Wi-Fi improvements. In fact, the majority of devices managed by Plume today are still Wi-Fi 5, a 2013 standard, and, thanks to Plume, they can perform at levels well above industry expectations.
Plume also ensures the same user experience across heterogeneous CPE of all types, multi-vendor, multi-platform, and multi-SOC, each with different radio and chipset capabilities. Thanks to OpenSync, RDK-B and OpenWRT integrations, and with global, cross-AP optimization driven by large-scale telemetry rather than per-AP heuristics. This ability to unify and optimize networks across different hardware vendors, chipsets, and platforms is something Wi-Fi 8 does not provide.
One of the main sources of dissatisfaction with Wi-Fi user experience is interference. Wi-Fi 7 introduced puncturing as a mechanism to reduce interference by shrinking channels, though this reduction came at the expense of a sharp drop in throughput. Wi-Fi 8 enhances that with Dynamic Subchannel Operation (DSO) and Non-Primary Channel Access (NPCA). Plume, in contrast, already performs fine-grained off-channel measurements and advanced channel planning for all devices and all Wi-Fi standards, ensuring that the wireless network is always on the best possible channel. It doesn’t require Wi-Fi 8’s Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR) to achieve multi-AP coordination; instead, it uses cloud visibility. As part of the recent internal Wi-Fi 7 competitive testing, we have confirmed that we remain the only tested company to respond to interference within minutes. Also, in another recent internal managed access points connectivity study conducted in the US and Europe, we have numbers showing 1 out of 5 homes in the US suffer from medium-to-high interference in 5GHz and 2 out of 3 suffer that same level of interference in the 2.4GHz band
When congestion hits the network, prioritizing between different applications is essential to ensure a good user experience. While Wi-Fi 8 defines deterministic QoS classes and deterministic access periods, Plume’s Full Stack Optimization and Application Prioritization provide application-aware scheduling and QoS enforcement across the entire home or property, using traffic classification and KPIs such as latency, jitter, and bitrate stability for each app. Sure, in a full Wi-Fi 8 network, with all devices Wi-Fi 8-capable, Plume will also leverage this capability, but Plume’s application intelligence, powered by AI models trained on massive telemetry datasets, delivers benefits across all devices, not just the new ones compliant with the latest standards. This was also tested in the Wi-Fi 7 competitive testing, showing that Plume was the only company in the test pool to be able to prioritize traffic when in bridge mode, the most common deployment scenario.
The thesis is simple: Plume delivers the reliability that Wi-Fi 8 is designed to achieve, plus the cloud intelligence to manage devices, applications, and multi-vendor hardware throughout the home. Unlike Wi-Fi 8, Plume works across a variety of Wi-Fi generations and devices, delivering these benefits years before the standard becomes widely adopted.
As mentioned earlier, Wi-Fi 8 certainly brings many improvements over Wi-Fi 7, with a focus on improved reliability, higher coding efficiency, and stronger performance in real-world conditions found in everyday homes.
Wi-Fi 8 is not just chasing higher “peak data rates”; it aims for ultra-high reliability (UHR), greater consistency, and lower latency, especially in dense, interference-heavy, or mission-critical environments. Additional techniques, such as Dynamic Sub-Channel Operation (DSO), Non-Primary Channel Access (NPCA), Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR), and Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF), help Wi-Fi 8 use the spectrum more efficiently, reduce interference, and improve performance under less-than-ideal conditions. Multi-AP coordination becomes more important: several APs coordinate in time, frequency, and space so the network behaves as a cooperating system, rather than each access point working independently.
Let’s discuss some of these changes in more detail.
PHY layer evolution
Wi-Fi 8 maintains the up to 320 MHz channelization and 4K-QAM introduced by Wi-Fi 7, but refines how that bandwidth is used.
Dynamic Sub-channel Operation (DSO)
Wi-Fi 7’s preamble puncturing allows an AP to mark certain sub-channels as unusable using predefined puncturing masks. This mechanism allows the AP to exclude only the sub-channels affected by interference while continuing to use the remaining clean portions of the wide channel. This is effective but coarse-grained.
Wi-Fi 8 extends this idea with Dynamic Sub-channel Operation (DSO), in which the wide channel (e.g., 320 MHz) is subdivided into finer sub-bands, and for each transmission opportunity, the transmitter may select any combination of clean sub-bands, not limited to a static, standardized puncturing pattern. Multiple stations can simultaneously occupy disjointed sub-bands within the same wide channel, improving spectral efficiency in mixed-capability device populations. This per-packet dynamic “puncturing” is more efficient than the Wi-Fi 7 approach.
DSO directly targets situations where existing narrowband systems (such as radars, analog video, or legacy equipment) occupy portions of the spectrum, or where neighboring BSSs partially overlap within a wide channel.
Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR) and Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF)
Multi-AP coordination is pulled deeper into the PHY, with the following features:
The PHY is no longer optimized per AP, but is co-designed with multi-AP scheduling at the MAC layer.
MAC Enhancements
Wi-Fi 8 uses Deterministic Multi-Link Operation (dMLO) and Non-Primary Channel Access (NPCA) to achieve lower jitter, more predictable latency, and more robust multi-stream performance in congested bands.
It also uses Hybrid ARQ (HARQ), which is one of the largest technical leaps in 802.11bn.
With HARQ, the receiver retains partial information from failed frames, and upon retransmission it sends only parity additions rather than full frames, resulting in much better performance at low SINR. This feature brings substantial reliability gains, especially near the edges of coverage areas or in noisy environments, and is expected to significantly reduce worst-case latency.
Mobility and Roaming
Wi-Fi 8 introduces Fast Multi-AP Handoff (F-MAH), allowing clients to pre-associate with multiple APs in a coordinated group. This enables seamless handover at the MLD level without losing connectivity during sessions. It also adds proactive key caching, reducing handover times to below one millisecond, and coordinated beam steering based on predictions of the client’s movement direction and speed, allowing mobile devices to roam with no perceptible dropouts.
Deterministic Quality of Service
Wi-Fi 8 introduces several components to ensure predictable latency for real-time traffic classes.
These include:
Deterministic Access Periods (DAPs)
These are time slices assigned by AP(s) in which only specific traffic classes or STAs may transmit. Inside these windows, there is no random CSMA contention. It works similarly to TSN Time-Aware Shapers (IEEE 802.1Qbv) and represents a major shift, as the AP acts as a time-domain scheduler rather than just a contention arbiter.
QoS traffic classes
Wi-Fi 8 extends beyond Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) and maps traffic into 4 different classes:
Traffic shaping and admission control
Wi-Fi 8 introduces a far more sophisticated approach to traffic shaping and admission control. Instead of relying solely on the traditional EDCA model, it adopts mechanisms that resemble the QoS bearer architecture found in LTE and 5G. Using the Enhanced Traffic Specification (eTSPEC), devices can describe their flow requirements in detail, allowing the network to make flow-based resource allocation decisions. APs admit deterministic flows only when performance guarantees can be met, and assign reserved scheduling slots to ensure predictability.
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) integration
Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn) includes native integration with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), aligning wireless behavior with wired TSN networks. To achieve this, the standard maps TSN time slots directly onto Wi-Fi 8’s Deterministic Access Periods (DAPs), ensuring that time-critical traffic retains its guarantees even when transitioning to the wireless medium. These mechanisms preserve essential TSN characteristics—bounded latency, limited jitter, and controlled frame delay variation- so that end-to-end performance remains predictable. Wi-Fi 8 further aligns wireless flows with wired TSN priorities through mapping to 802.1Qbv and 802.1Qci filters, enabling consistent traffic treatment regardless of whether the packet is moving across Ethernet or the radio interface.
Coordinated Multi-AP QoS Enforcement
Wi-Fi 8 extends QoS beyond a single access point by enabling Coordinated Scheduling (CS) across entire AP clusters. Through this mechanism, a group of access points share scheduling information and synchronize their medium access behavior. Instead of each AP independently attempting CSMA/CA access, CS allows APs to coordinate their transmissions, reduce interference between neighboring networks, and reserve airtime for specific traffic classes.
CS essentially turns multiple APs into a single coordinated scheduler, improving SINR, reducing collisions, ensuring QoS guarantees are met, and enabling more predictable roaming performance across multiple APs.
MLO-Aware QoS (QoS per Link)
Wi-Fi 7 introduced multi-link operation (MLO), but Wi-Fi 8 adds QoS awareness for each individual link, meaning the 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz links can each have their own traffic class and latency target.
With this MLO-aware QoS, a single flow can be deterministic on one link, best-effort on another, or split across links using priority-aware scheduling. This enables much more robust performance for XR, industrial, or other latency-sensitive applications.
HARQ + QoS
Previously, we discussed Hybrid ARQ (error recovery) and how significant this change is. This can be used with its QoS model so retransmissions no longer cause long delays. With this, latency-sensitive flows get HARQ “fast repair” priority, significantly lowering worst-case latency compared to Wi-Fi 7.
Wi-Fi 7 offers lower latency and improved performance over Wi-Fi 6, but it still mainly works under ideal conditions and in close proximity to the AP. At Plume, we know that ideal conditions rarely exist, and we work hard every day to improve worst-case scenarios, so every customer can have a good wireless experience at home. As tested in the Wi-Fi 7 competitive study, Plume gets the highest comparative throughput for the worst-positioned client. Wi-Fi 8 aims for much more deterministic latency (not just on average, but in the worst moments), seamless mobility (devices roaming between APs without losing connectivity), and stronger reliability at the edges of coverage.
Plume’s cloud-based control, AI-driven optimization, and open CPE integration were designed around many of the same UHR principles that now formalize Wi-Fi 8:
And we can do all of the above by applying advanced machine learning algorithms that consider past and present conditions, user behavior, device intelligence, and application information to maximize user experience.
The following chapters highlight concrete parallels.
Reliability
Earlier, we noted the PHY and MAC changes in Wi-Fi 8 to manage narrowband interference more effectively than with “just” preamble puncturing. At Plume, a cloud-based optimizer continuously analyzes on-channel metrics such as RSSI, SNR, retransmission rates, airtime usage, per-client MCS, and off-channel scans (overlapping BSSs, DFS radar events, and narrowband interferers). It considers both short- and long-term interference to choose the best channel for each AP.
This long-term interference and visibility give Plume the ability to proactively avoid interference when it is cyclical. When interference appears suddenly (“fast interference”), we react within seconds, seamlessly moving to the best available channel.
For Wi-Fi 7 networks, we also use preamble puncturing to avoid narrowband interference, and we proactively puncture channels when neighboring APs detect DFS-related interference.
Using a cloud optimizer (a powerful mathematical optimization solver) allows for more advanced use cases, such as interference reduction in Multi-Dwelling Units (MDUs). In this scenario, the optimizer coordinates channel distribution across the MDUs to improve the performance of clients utilizing the network at any given time, similar to Coordinated Spatial Reuse in Wi-Fi 8.
Device Intelligence
No Wi-Fi standard can compensate for the wide variety of devices connected today. The Wi-Fi Alliance expects 3.9B Wi-Fi devices to ship in 2025 across all generations, of which only 15% will be Wi-Fi 7-capable, representing less than 2% of the total installed base. In our trials, only 1.29% of devices support MLO.
More importantly, many devices still do not support specific channels due to regulations, outdated drivers, or country-code issues. For example, even if Channel 100 in 5 GHz is completely clean, a Wi-Fi 6 Amazon Firestick may not connect to it.
Unlike approaches that rely on theoretical performance models, Plume combines intelligence from billions of daily network observations with device-aware AI to understand what each connected client is truly capable of—then optimizes channels and topology accordingly.
Beyond channel selection, Plume’s Adapt system improves steering with device-specific profiles, such as Windows-optimized steering. Compared to generic steering, the Windows profile improved upsteer success rates by ~25% and reduced troubled events and disconnects by ~50%.
Deterministic Wi-Fi
As discussed, Wi-Fi 8 introduces new QoS classes that map traffic into deterministic latency, low-latency, high-throughput, and background categories. Plume already operates a QoS and scheduling stack that is application-aware and centrally controlled. With Plume’s Application Prioritization, we automatically detect real-time traffic classes (a concept that Wi-Fi 8 incorporates) versus non-real-time classes, and, within the real-time class, Plume is aware of the impact of different KPIs for each. Gaming is highly sensitive to latency, video streaming depends on a consistent bitrate, and videoconferencing is sensitive to sudden bitrate drops.
We apply different profiles for each application and device type, with auto-optimization and the option for the user to choose what is most important. One family may prioritize video calls; another may prioritize low-latency gaming. This works for all device types, not just the newest models, and provides a deterministic experience at the application layer, even when the underlying MAC is Wi-Fi 5, 6, or 7.
We also mentioned that Wi-Fi 8 supports Coordinated Scheduling (CS) across APs, a mechanism that allows AP clusters to share their QoS schedules. As a result, high-priority flows receive protected spectrum across the entire AP cluster. In Plume-managed homes, this coordination already happens today, with QoS policies enforced across the full network regardless of how many APs are present.
Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn) represents a meaningful evolution from Wi-Fi 7. Its shift from peak throughput to Ultra-High Reliability brings improvements such as coordinated multi-AP behavior, deterministic scheduling, reduced worst-case latency, and greater predictability for real-time applications. These enhancements address the same challenges highlighted in this paper’s introduction: real-world interference, device diversity, and the need for consistency rather than theoretical peak rates.
However, achieving the benefits of Wi-Fi 8 in the real world will take time. Its capabilities depend on new silicon, new access points, and new client hardware. The ecosystem refresh required to support these benefits is long, costly, and slow. Industry outlooks suggest that meaningful Wi-Fi 8 adoption will not begin until 2028, and even then, homes will still contain a mix of Wi-Fi 5, 6, 6E, 7, and 8 devices for many years. As with every past standard transition, the installed base will lag far behind the specification.
Plume removes this dependency on hardware refresh cycles.
The same principles that Wi-Fi 8 formalizes – worst-case optimization, coordinated AP behavior, deterministic QoE, device-aware intelligence – are already built into Plume’s cloud-based architecture and operating at scale across millions of homes today. Plume delivers many of the reliability, coordination, and QoS outcomes of Wi-Fi 8 targets, but does so across existing Wi-Fi generations, not just new devices.
In addition, Plume extends far beyond what any Wi-Fi standard can provide:
For service providers, Plume is the practical and immediate path to what Wi-Fi 8 promises. Plume delivers Wi-Fi 8-level reliability today, improves the performance of every device already in the home, and layers cloud intelligence, security, operational visibility, and new services on top of the evolving radio standard.
Wi-Fi 8 strengthens the foundation. Plume turns that foundation into a consistent, reliable, and intelligent whole-home experience, now, not years from now.
Investigation reveals media streaming devices sold at major U.S. retailers silently tunnel third-party internet traffic, including potentially stolen credentials and enterprise security bypass operations through subscribers’ home broadband connections
PALO ALTO, Calif., May 28, 2026 — Plume Design, Inc. (“Plume”), the global subscriber experience platform for more than 450 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across 58 countries, today released a report that uncovers significant security concerns found in SuperBox Android streaming devices sold at major U.S. retailers, which contain dormant software that when activated converts consumers’ home internet connections into nodes in a residential proxy network or SuperProxy. The proxy routes unknown third-party traffic that includes potentially stolen credentials, account takeover materials and enterprise security bypass operations through subscriber households without their knowledge or consent. The report, based on a months-long investigation, is the first in a series from Plume’s Security Labs.
“The average connected home is becoming increasingly complex, more like a corporate network, and threats like this one illustrate the need for significantly enhanced levels of intelligence and security,” said Chris Griffiths, Chief Technology Officer at Plume. “ISPs are better situated than ever to be on the forefront of detecting and resolving these issues. By leveraging AI and large-scale network orchestration across hundreds of millions of devices, we can help ISPs spot anomalies that individual households or traditional security tools often miss, and act on them before they spread.”
Plume manages one of the most comprehensive data sets in the telecommunications industry, monitoring more than 500 million connected devices across 40 million households globally. After an alert from a customer, Plume’s Network Operations Center flagged anomalous outbound traffic from an unusually high number of streaming devices across its network. The traffic volume was sufficient to destabilize residential networks, prompting Plume’s Security Labs to launch a comprehensive technical investigation into streaming devices, spanning multiple models, across its user base.
“The SuperProxy investigation is a wake-up call,” said Eric Svenson, Vice President, Technology Engineering and Operations at Armstrong, (a multi-state operator based in Pennsylvania). “Consumer devices are being weaponized inside our subscribers’ homes, and as their ISP, we have both the responsibility and the vantage point to do something about it. Plume’s research is the kind of partnership our industry needs more of; work that protects Armstrong customers today and sets a higher standard for what every subscriber should expect from their provider.”
“These devices ship with remote access and full administrative control, wide open and require no password, no authentication, no user approval,” said Griffiths. “Unfortunately, this isn’t limited to a single product. The same residential proxy software was used in other types of consumer media streaming devices and also used in other malicious campaigns such as the Vo1d botnet, which demonstrates this is a broader supply-chain problem across the streaming ecosystem.”
Five Key Findings
A streaming app secretly turns the device into a proxy network node. One of the apps available through SuperBox’s custom application store, Cyberflix TV, contains hidden proxy software called Popanet that silently registers the device with a remote command server and begins relaying foreign internet traffic through the subscriber’s home connection. Plume’s telemetry recorded tens of thousands of outbound connections per device per day to thousands of distinct destinations.
Sensitive credentials and security bypass attempts are flowing through subscriber homes. Researchers intercepted the actual traffic being routed through the proxy and found sensitive login credentials for gaming platforms, messaging app verification codes that could be used for real-time account takeovers, deliberate attempts to defeat enterprise security systems and large-scale automated web scraping, all passing through consumer broadband connections without the subscriber’s knowledge.
Plume mapped more than 250 proxy server addresses. Researchers fully reverse-engineered Popanet’s command-and-control protocol — the first publicly known teardown of this system — and mapped more than 250 verified server addresses across multiple hosting providers, revealing a professionally built proxy operation.
A security flaw in the proxy’s own code exposes the home network. The proxy attempts to block access to the subscriber’s local network, but contains a bypass that was confirmed through live testing. Remote proxy users can exploit this flaw to reach the device’s own internal services, potentially extending the compromise beyond the device to the home network itself.
SuperBox’s custom app store bypasses all standard Android safety checks. The store installs software silently with full administrative privileges: no security verification, no warnings and no user approval. Its catalog is controlled by the store’s operator, not by Google nor the device owner.
Plume’s Approach
Plume is identifying and isolating these proxies for blocking at multiple levels and sharing intelligence with its ISP customers. Monitoring these proxies is extending Plume’s detection capabilities to additional threat types including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) tools and botnets.
Multi-phased Research
This is Part 1 of a three-part investigative series into SuperBox and the hidden security risks it presents inside subscriber homes. Part 2 will expose the malware ecosystem exploiting subscriber devices, including botnet agents and competing proxy SDKs, and detail how Plume helps ISPs detect and block these threats. Part 3 will examine the content delivery infrastructure behind SuperBox’s “latest movies” promise, presenting technical evidence that raises serious questions about the origin of that content.
The full research paper is available at:
plume.com/resources/superproxy-the-unhealthy-marriage-of-superbox-and-residential-proxies
About Plume
Plume established the first managed WiFi platform for ISPs in 2016, enabling the company to scale across the globe and expand into managing the entire subscriber experience, including approximately 500 million connected devices, in 40 million homes, on behalf of 450 ISPs, across 58 countries. By integrating managed WiFi, cybersecurity and customer care, Plume created the first open, hardware-agnostic SaaS Subscriber Experience Platform for ISPs. Powered by an unmatched global dataset and AI optimization, the Plume Platform builds subscriber confidence through improved Wi-Fi experiences, seamless new service implementation and proactive customer care. Plume’s open-source framework OpenSync® is pre-integrated and supported on the leading silicon, CPE and platform SDKs, and supports leading industry standards like RDK-B and prplWave. Discover more about how Plume is empowering ISPs at plume.com.
About Armstrong
For over 80 years, Armstrong has been a leader in telecommunications technology and innovation. Founded in 1946 by Jud L. Sedwick as Armstrong County Line Construction, Armstrong remains a family-owned and operated company deeply committed to the communities it serves.
Armstrong’s world-class fiber network spans six states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, New York, West Virginia, and Kentucky—delivering advanced infrastructure with a focus on exceptional customer service and satisfaction. The company provides 24/7 local support, transparent pricing, and complimentary technical service to residential and business customers throughout its service area.
For more information on Armstrong’s Advanced Fiber Network, please visit ArmstrongOneWire.com/network.
When streaming services like Netflix went mainstream, they didn’t just change how households consumed content. They redefined what “good broadband” actually meant. Networks that delivered Netflix flawlessly became the networks subscribers chose, recommended, and stayed loyal to. Netflix’s own ISP Speed Index became a public scoreboard, and ISP product teams optimized, quite literally, to climb it. Streaming wasn’t just a service riding on top of the network; it became a yardstick for the network itself.
Today, a new yardstick is emerging.
LLMs have been adopted faster than any consumer technology in modern history. ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application ever, reaching 100 million users in two months, a pace UBS analysts called the steepest consumer-internet ramp they had seen in twenty years. And the data we see across Plume-enabled homes confirms the trend hasn’t peaked. It has accelerated. Subscribers aren’t just trying these tools; they are embedding them into how they work, how they think, and increasingly, how they protect their livelihood in a job market being reshaped by AI itself.
At Plume, we are studying how tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, and the next wave of agentic assistants like Claude Code and Cowork, are showing up in real homes. What we see is striking.
As of April 2026, more than 1 in 5 active Plume-enabled locations, approximately 22%, show regular AI app traffic on their home Wi-Fi, up from 19% a year ago. That number is intentionally conservative: it captures only what we can see crossing the home network, on the home network. Independent research suggests the broader picture is far larger. Parks Associates reports that 58% of US internet households now use generative AI tools when self-reporting across all devices. In other words, AI in the home has plenty of runway left, and what is happening inside the homes already using it is anything but steady.
Among AI-using households, total data volume tied to AI apps has grown by roughly 2,000% year-on-year. Time spent connected to AI apps, what we measure as “online seconds”, has climbed 364% over the same period, and a further 80% since the start of 2026 alone. Median session length has lengthened by around 30% year-on-year.
The leader is unsurprising: ChatGPT now accounts for roughly 2x the time-on-app of any other AI tool in our footprint, with median sessions approaching 5 minutes. But the fastest movers may be more telling. Perplexity and Claude are the fastest-growing AI apps in both data volume and usage. Microsoft Copilot is currently the slowest-growing of the major players.
These are not quick lookups. Multi-minute, interactive, real-time sessions imply something networks rarely had to optimize for in the chatbot era: sensitivity to latency, jitter and micro-outages, not just peak bandwidth.
The most important signal in our data isn’t how much AI is being used. It is how it is being used. The first wave of consumer LLM adoption was conversational and human-prompted. The second wave, already visible, is agentic: AI tools that run multi-step tasks, call APIs, sync with mailboxes and storage, schedule, monitor, and act semi-autonomously on behalf of the subscriber.
For ISP networks, this is a different beast. Agentic AI introduces persistent background traffic as agents synchronise and monitor outside of active sessions; machine-to-machine and API-heavy patterns as multi-step workflows ripple across dozens of SaaS services; and bursty, recurring workloads triggered by a single user command. Reliability stops being a nice-to-have. When one micro-outage breaks a multi-step automation, the user doesn’t see a buffering icon. They see a failed task. And increasingly, that task is part of how they earn a living.
This is exactly the kind of shift Plume’s AI platform was built to absorb. Our Application Intelligence identifies the most popular LLMs across our global footprint and tracks how subscribers actually use them. Our Behavior Intelligence monitors how the nature of that usage is evolving, from chatbot to autonomous agent, so the network can adapt in real time, not in hindsight.We also make such insights available to our ISPs through API and our Operator Suite so they can also make better decisions on network planning. The AI landscape is moving faster than any consumer category before it. Plume will continue to study LLMs and their evolution into autonomous agents, and to ensure operators on our platform are ready to deliver Quality of Outcome, not just Quality of Experience, for the workflows their subscribers increasingly depend on.
The next Netflix moment isn’t coming. It’s already here.
Under new leadership, global connectivity provider recognized for culture transformation, employee-first approach and deep emotional connection across a worldwide team
PALO ALTO, CA — April 15, 2026 — Plume Design, Inc. (“Plume”), the global technology leader trusted by more than 450 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across 58 countries, today announced it has earned Most Loved Workplace® Certification from Most Loved Workplace® and the Best Practice Institute less than one year after launching a company-wide culture transformation initiative under new leadership. This certification, based on the proprietary Love of Workplace Index® (LOWI) framework, is awarded to organizations where employees demonstrate the deepest levels of positive sentiment, shared values and emotional connection to their work. Plume will be featured among certified Most Loved Workplaces® in upcoming editions in The Economist (May 2026) and The Wall Street Journal (October 2026).
The recognition marks a significant milestone in a deliberate transformation. When Dan Herscovici assumed the role of President and CEO in April 2025, he made culture one of the company’s first strategic priorities. Over the past year, the company has undertaken a company-wide culture initiative anchored in rebuilding trust, strengthening accountability and ensuring every Plume team member feels they belong and can do their best work. The results can be measured through the LOWI framework and are reflected in employees’ own words, describing their experiences.
“There is a beautiful collaborative spirit that runs through Plume. We problem solve as a team, challenging each other in a psychologically safe manner, to come up with the best solutions. We have a shared desire to deliver excellent service to our customers.”
“The company’s focus on improving culture has helped me grow personally and professionally. There is a new direction that was missing previously and now there is always something new to learn.”
“The new tone that is being set at the top of the company is refreshing and reaffirming. Plume has clear goals, and what we are working towards is exciting. My colleagues, including supervisors and team members, are all great to work with.”
“We have an incredible culture of transparency, empowerment and accountability. Every day we have interesting, technical challenges to solve, which is rewarding. Our leaders give us the right balance of support and autonomy.”
“When I joined Plume, I came to a company with extraordinary technology and an outstanding team of professionals that wanted to believe in where they worked, so we made creating a great culture and rewarding work environment one of our top objectives,” said Mr. Herscovici. “We treated it as a business imperative, because you cannot deliver world-class experiences for 450 ISP customers if the people building the products and solutions don’t feel respected and heard. Building better connections is not just a tagline, it is a commitment that we strive for every day, not only with our customers, but equally with our team members. This recognition reflects the genuine commitment we have made to implementing changes that employees can see and feel. We are proud of being recognized for our efforts, and we intend to keep earning our team members’ trust and respect.”
“Culture transformation at a company with offices around the world doesn’t happen by sending an email,” said Lorie Boyd, Chief People Officer at Plume. “We set out to rebuild trust, to create real accountability and to make sure every team member, in every country we operate, felt seen and supported. What made this real was that we didn’t treat it as an HR initiative. It was a complete commitment from the CEO down through the entire organization. The words our employees used to describe their experiences here tell us the work is landing. That is what matters most.”
Most Loved Workplace® certification is earned following LOWI assessment across the five SPARK dimensions: Systemic Collaboration, Positive Future, Alignment of Values, Respect and Killer Outcomes.
“What sets Most Loved Workplaces apart is not a score on a survey — it is the depth of emotional connection employees feel to their work, their colleagues and the future they are building together,” said Louis Carter, CEO and Founder of Best Practice Institute and Most Loved Workplace®. “Plume demonstrates exactly what the SPARK model reveals in the highest-performing organizations: a positive vision of the future that people believe in, values that are lived not posted and leaders who create the conditions for people to love where they work. That is not soft. That is a competitive advantage.”
Plume powers intelligent, cloud-managed Wi-Fi, security, and subscriber experience services for more than 450 ISPs globally — including Bell, Charter, Jio, J:COM, Liberty Global and FPT Telecom — delivering reliable, secure and personalized experiences across nearly half a billion connected devices worldwide.
The culture initiative coincides with a period of accelerating business momentum. Over the past 12 months, Plume has:
Plume joins a global community of certified companies recognized by Most Loved Workplace® for placing the emotional wellbeing and connection of their people at the center of how they operate. For more on why Plume was certified as a Most Loved Workplace®, visit https://mostlovedworkplace.com/companies/plume/.
Ms. Boyd will participate in a Most Loved Workplace hosted webinar, Rebuilding Belief in Employee Voice, on Wednesday, April 15 at 3 pm Eastern. Click here to register for the free webinar.
About Plume
Plume created the first managed Wi-Fi platform for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in 2016 and continues to lead today with a best-in-class solution for cloud-managed Wi-Fi, security, and workflow orchestration – all powered by an unmatched dataset and AI. With almost half a billion devices connected to its platform, Plume is a trusted technology partner for more than 400 ISPs around the world, helping them deliver subscriber confidence through better Wi-Fi experiences, new services, and proactive customer care. Plume leverages OpenSync®, an open-source framework that comes pre-integrated and supported on the leading silicon, CPE, and platform SDKs, and supports leading industry standards like RDK-B and prplWave. Combined with powerful AI orchestration tools with its acquisition of Sweepr, Plume now offers ISPs a true end-to-end solution to power their most important workflows and customer experiences, while making deployment simpler and faster. Plume is leading the way in providing ISPs an intelligence and innovation edge to stay competitive, build subscriber confidence, and adapt to the changing needs of the market. Discover more about how Plume is empowering ISPs by visiting https://www.plume.com.
About Most Loved Workplace®
Most Loved Workplace® is a certification and research organization that identifies companies where employees demonstrate the deepest levels of positive sentiment and emotional connection, measured across the five SPARK dimensions: Systemic Collaboration, Positive Future, Alignment of Values, Respect, and Killer Outcomes. Certified Most Loved Workplaces® are eligible for inclusion on annual Top 100 lists featured in leading publications such as The Economist (Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces) and The Wall Street Journal (America’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces), and on broadcast features on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg and others. Learn more at mostlovedworkplace.com.
Plume Platform powers smarter, more consistent in-home Wi-Fi experiences across FPT subscriber base
HANOI, VIETNAM and PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA —MARCH 18, 2026—FPT Telecom, one of Vietnam’s leading telecommunications and Internet service providers and a subsidiary of FPT Corporation, today announced a strategic partnership with personalized smart services pioneer Plume® to bring the globally recognized Plume Platform to FPT Telecom subscribers across Vietnam. The deployment marks a significant step in FPT Telecom’s ongoing commitment to delivering the best possible in-home connectivity experience for its customers.
FPT’s network leverages the Plume Platform’s advanced Wi-Fi optimization and AI-informed application recognition and prioritization technologies to create a more consistent, reliable home network that adapts to the way each household uses the Internet. Whether subscribers are streaming video, joining video calls, gaming or working from home, the Plume Platform intelligently identifies and prioritizes the applications and activities that matter most, ensuring smoother performance across every connected device. Powered by cloud-based analytics and AI/machine learning, Plume continuously improves performance by learning from patterns across tens of millions of households globally, helping the network adapt to new devices and applications over time.
“Our mission at Plume is to help the world’s best internet service providers deliver the best customer experience possible,” said Dan Herscovici, President and CEO of Plume. “FPT’s commitment to putting the customer experience first aligns perfectly with what Plume does every day for ISPs around the world and we look forward to helping them deliver a network experience that truly reflects that commitment, powered by Wi-Fi-optimization and AI-informed application prioritization capabilities to subscribers across Vietnam.”
Today’s households rely on Wi-Fi for an ever-growing range of activities, from remote work and online education to high-definition streaming and smart home devices. Delivering consistent, high-performance connectivity across every corner of the home is no longer a nice-to-have; it is essential. By selecting Plume as a technology partner, FPT is taking a proactive step to meet that demand and raise the bar for the subscriber experience in Vietnam.
“At FPT, improving customer experience is always our top priority,” said Mr. Le Trung, Director of Infrastructure Development and Management Center, FPT Telecom, FPT Corporation. “We are a technology pioneer in Vietnam and among the first to widely deploy Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7, as well as introduce broadband services of up to 10Gbps. Building on this foundation, we continuously collaborate with leading technology partners to further enhance the quality and consistency of in-home Wi-Fi, enabling our subscribers to enjoy seamless, best-in-class connectivity for their everyday digital needs”.
The Plume Platform on the FPT network delivers several AI-driven Wi-Fi optimization and security benefits to subscribers including:
Through this partnership, FPT and Plume are working together to set a new standard for in-home Wi-Fi in Vietnam, one that places the needs and daily digital habits of subscribers at the center of everything while building trust.
About FPT Telecom
FPT Telecom Joint Stock Company is one of Vietnam’s leading telecommunications and Internet service providers, and a member company of FPT Corporation — the largest IT corporation in Vietnam. Established in 1997, FPT Telecom was a pioneer in bringing Internet connectivity to Vietnamese citizens and continues to serve millions of households and businesses nationwide. Its services span broadband Internet (including fiber-to-the-home), IPTV, data center, cloud computing, and value-added digital services. FPT Telecom is guided by a customer-first philosophy and a continuous commitment to deploying state-of-the-art technology to deliver outstanding digital experiences. Learn more at https://www.fpt.vn.
About Plume
Plume created the first managed Wi-Fi platform for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in 2016 and continues to lead today with a best-in-class solution for cloud-managed Wi-Fi, security, and workflow orchestration – all powered by an unmatched dataset and AI. With almost half a billion devices connected to its platform, Plume is a trusted technology partner for more than 400 ISPs around the world, helping them deliver subscriber confidence through better Wi-Fi experiences, new services, and proactive customer care. Plume leverages OpenSync®, an open-source framework that comes pre-integrated and supported on the leading silicon, CPE, and platform SDKs, and supports leading industry standards like RDK-B and prplWave. Combined with powerful AI orchestration tools with its acquisition of Sweepr, Plume now offers ISPs a true end-to-end solution to power their most important workflows and customer experiences, while making deployment simpler and faster. Plume is leading the way in providing ISPs an intelligence and innovation edge to stay competitive, build subscriber confidence, and adapt to the changing needs of the market. Discover more about how Plume is empowering ISPs by visiting https://www.plume.com.
Former Cisco and Meraki executive to oversee Plume’s go-to-market strategy with a focus on deepening engagement with ISP customers and building subscriber confidence by turning intelligence into action
PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Plume, a leader in cloud-managed Wi-Fi, security, and smart home services for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), today announced the appointment of Rebecca Stone as the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer.
Stone brings more than 20 years of experience leading global enterprise and service provider marketing organizations across brand, product marketing, growth, and revenue strategy, as well as a deep understanding of service provider needs across multiple industry tiers. Most recently, she served as Senior Vice President of Revenue Marketing and Customer Solutions Marketing at Cisco, where she oversaw media, integrated marketing, campaign planning, content marketing and operations, and demand marketing for Cisco’s $50B networking portfolio.
At Plume, Stone will help Plume deepen engagement with ISP customers while clearly articulating the value of the company’s expanding capabilities around intelligent Wi-Fi management, telemetry and analytics, cybersecurity, and customer care, powered by an unprecedented dataset and artificial intelligence. Plume aims to work with ISPs to strengthen subscriber confidence by turning data and insights into action, including a more robust offering that incorporates powerful AI orchestration technology from recently acquired Sweepr.
“The industry is shifting quickly, and Plume is entering a new chapter: one platform, a stronger customer experience, and more value from data and AI for ISPs,” said Dan Herscovici, CEO of Plume. “In a market this crowded, clarity wins and we’re going to make Plume the obvious choice. Rebecca has built and scaled world-class marketing teams across cloud, networking, and service providers. Her customer empathy and ability to translate complex technology into differentiated value will be critical as we help partners stand out, grow, and compete.”
Plume’s cloud platform connects nearly half a billion devices, creating an unmatched foundation of real-world network and device telemetry across diverse home environments. In this rapidly evolving broadband landscape—with rising subscriber expectations, intensifying competition, and AI shaping service delivery—Stone will oversee marketing strategy, brand positioning, and go-to-market execution as the company enters its next phase of growth. She will play an integral role in how Plume communicates this refreshed approach and suite of new capabilities to ISPs and the broadband industry, bringing them to life with clarity and inspiration across channels.
“I’m delighted to join Plume at this transformative moment in the company’s growth,” says Rebecca Stone, Chief Marketing Officer at Plume. “I’ve spent my career focused on building innovative marketing teams that accelerate growth and drive customer success, especially in an increasingly AI-powered landscape. There’s nothing more valuable than hearing from your customers, learning from them, and turning those insights into action that propels their success. I look forward to curating experiences where Plume can engage in a deeper and more meaningful way with them in the year ahead.”
Prior to Cisco, Stone was Chief Marketing Officer at Meraki, where she doubled the global marketing team to 150 employees, led a major rebrand and messaging transformation, and grew marketing-sourced pipeline contribution to 35%. At LiveRamp, she served as VP of Marketing, leading a team of 70 marketers and sales staff and helping the company expand from $20M to $300M+ in four years. She previously held marketing leadership roles at DataSift and Calix, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from UC Santa Barbara.
About Plume
Plume created the first managed Wi-Fi platform for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in 2016 and continues to lead today with a best-in-class solution for cloud-managed Wi-Fi, security, and workflow orchestration – all powered by an unmatched dataset and AI. With almost half a billion devices connected to its platform, Plume is a trusted technology partner for more than 400 ISPs around the world, helping them deliver subscriber confidence through better Wi-Fi experiences, new services, and proactive customer care. Plume leverages OpenSync®, an open-source framework that comes pre-integrated and supported on the leading silicon, CPE, and platform SDKs, and supports leading industry standards like RDK-B and prplWave. Combined with powerful AI orchestration tools with its acquisition of Sweepr, Plume now offers ISPs a true end-to-end solution to power their most important workflows and customer experiences, while making deployment simpler and faster. Plume is leading the way in providing ISPs an intelligence and innovation edge to stay competitive, build subscriber confidence, and adapt to the changing needs of the market. Discover more about how Plume is empowering ISPs by visiting https://www.plume.com.
SOURCE Plume Design, Inc.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Plume today announced its membership in the prpl Foundation, a leading industry global alliance advancing open-source and open-standard development for next-generation connected devices. As a Gold member, the second highest tier, Plume will collaborate with industry peers to accelerate innovation in cloud-based services and broadband and IoT intelligence for Internet service providers (ISP) and provide exceptional consumer experience.
Plume is participating in this week’s Global prpl Summit 2025 in Paris, France, (13-14 October) – the annual gathering of prpl members advancing open standards for the connected home. There, the company will share an early demonstration of their technology now running on the prpl platform – a first step toward delivering its hallmark consumer experience innovations through open standards.
As part of its support of industry standards, Plume is adopting a more open and collaborative approach with its ISP customers and technology partners, meeting them where their technology needs are as they increasingly deploy hardware and services powered by prpl. Plume’s cloud-based platform — with advanced services and APIs for Wi-Fi management, customer care, network intelligence, and security — delivers added intelligence and value to prpl-based deployments.
“Integrating our cloud-based platform with the prpl framework gives us the flexibility to deliver new levels of intelligence across the connected home,” said Plume CTO Chris Griffiths. “It’s an important step toward realizing a more open, software-defined future – one that elevates the consumer experience while enabling our ISP partners to innovate faster.”
“Plume’s membership underscores the continued industry commitment to advancing open standards for the connected home,” said Dr. Leonard Dauphinee, president of prpl Foundation. “We look forward to their participation and contributions to the prpl community as we work together to expand the benefits of openness and interoperability.”
At the NetworkX exhibition in Paris, Plume will also host customer meetings in its private meeting room (Pavilion 7 – Atrium Room 738) and will discuss the future of broadband and IoT experiences, including the responsible adoption of AI, self-healing home networks, and the development of a network intelligence operating system that will define the next era of connectivity and the consumer experience.
About Plume
Plume created the first managed Wi-Fi platform for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in 2016 and continues to lead today with a best-in-class solution for cloud-managed Wi-Fi, security, and experience. With almost half a billion devices connected to its platform, Plume is a trusted technology partner for more than 400 ISPs around the world, helping them deliver better Wi-Fi experiences and services for subscribers while streamlining their own operations and support systems. Plume leverages OpenSync®, an open-source framework that comes pre-integrated and supported on the leading silicon, CPE, and platform SDKs, and supports leading industry standards like RDK-B and prplWave. This approach allows Plume to offer turnkey and modular solutions, giving ISPs ultimate flexibility, while enabling simpler and faster deployments. Plume is leading the way in providing ISPs an intelligence and innovation edge to stay competitive and adapt to the changing needs of subscribers and the market. Discover more about how Plume is empowering ISPs by visiting https://www.plume.com.
About prpl Foundation
The prpl Foundation is a collaborative open-source community dedicated to open APIs and open industry standards, focusing on carrier-grade software for broadband customer premise equipment as specified by operator members. The prpl Foundation brings together service providers, original equipment manufacturers, system integrators, chip vendors and application developers to harmonize home network architecture, then commonizes a reference implementation of standardized open-source infrastructure built atop open APIs and open industry standards. prpl enables a service delivery ecosystem including innovative third-party applications that can be quickly and easily deployed across different CPE platforms. Learn more about prpl Foundation at https://prplfoundation.org/members/.
SOURCE Plume Design, Inc.
