Hotel entertainment has entered a new era, and guests are leading the change. Today’s travelers expect in-room TVs to work like their devices at home, complete with streaming, casting, and interactive options. Legacy cable and satellite systems alone can’t always meet those expectations or the operational needs of modern hospitality.

IPTV for hotels solves that gap. By delivering live television and on-demand content through a property’s IP network, IPTV offers sharper picture quality, flexible channel control, and a more personalized experience for every guest. Viewers can stream, cast, and access hotel services directly from the screen. For operators, IPTV means lower long-term costs and simpler upgrades. It also enables full integration with property systems like PMS, housekeeping, and digital signage.

Industry data shows that hotels switching to IPTV can reduce five-year entertainment costs by as much as 65%. Choosing IPTV can also cut energy costs by nearly a third. As the global market for IPTV in hotels grows toward an estimated $10 billion within the next decade, forward-thinking properties are already making the shift.

The takeaway is clear: IPTV has matured from an emerging option into a hospitality standard. It enhances guest satisfaction, streamlines operations, and protects long-term investment.

Read our full white paper to explore how IPTV can modernize your property’s entertainment experience and why hotels that upgrade now will lead the connected guest era.

Download full white paper

As the 2026 E-Rate cycle approaches, schools have an opportunity to modernize their infrastructure and prepare for the next generation of learning. The right network connects more than devices. It connects people, ideas, and opportunities that move education forward.

The modern classroom doesn’t run on chalk and projectors anymore. It runs on bandwidth.

From the moment teachers upload their lessons to the instant students power up their Chromebooks, the network quietly carries learning and collaboration forward. As schools prepare for their next E-Rate refresh cycle in summer 2026, dependable Wi-Fi and switching have become as critical as electricity.

The network is the classroom

New devices and applications are transforming learning, and K-12 IT leaders are managing much more than access points and switches. Each classroom is now a connected ecosystem of:

• Smartboards, digital projectors, and AV systems
• Laptops, tablets, and personal devices
• Sensors, cameras, and building controls
• Athletic and esports technology that demands real-time performance

For education environments, reliable coverage, high-density performance, and low-latency streaming are table stakes. But every new device impacts performance, increases management complexity, and introduces another potential point of failure to the network infrastructure. When the network slows, teaching and learning grind to a halt.

STEM in motion

Today’s K-12 classrooms have evolved into rich, personalized, interactive learning experiences. During a recent visit to a customer’s science lab, I watched students coding sensors on Raspberry Pis to track the temperature and humidity of their terrariums. Their data streamed wirelessly to dashboards they could check from home. Around them, 3D printers built objects, and tablets displayed visualizations.

It was STEM in action, a clear example of how far classrooms have come since the AV cart days of the 1990s. For IT teams, it was also proof of how much depends on the performance and reliability of the network.

The IT reality

Although reliable high-performance Wi-Fi is essential in every classroom, district IT teams are often stretched thin. They spend time on ghost issues, repeat tickets, and site visits just to locate the source of a slowdown. Without the right visibility and insight, troubleshooting becomes guesswork.

With RUCKUS AI^™, IT teams can move from reactive to proactive network management. Predictive analytics, real-time diagnostics, and automated troubleshooting provide clear, relevant insight into performance. That means fewer classroom interruptions, faster fixes, and more time to focus on strategy.

Esports and the campus network

Esports programs are no longer a novelty. They have become a powerful tool for engaging students with active, collaborative experiences. They are also a critical proving ground for school networks. Competitive gaming requires low latency, consistent throughput, and reliable quality of service. The same standards apply to more traditional learning applications like digital testing, streaming assemblies, and remote learning. That means a network that performs under the pressure of esports can handle most anything the modern campus demands.

Building for results

Every IT director shares the same goal: delivering an engaging, uninterrupted learning experience.

For teachers, that means fewer Wi-Fi complaints.

For students, it means consistent access to digital tools that support creativity and collaboration.

For IT, it means networks that help them anticipate, identify, and resolve problems before they reach the classroom.

RUCKUS Networks builds for this reality. Our Wi-Fi 7 access points and network switches deliver the performance needed for future applications. Dynamic PSK^™ (pre-shared keys) provides secure, simple access for students. RUCKUS AI gives IT teams the visibility and automation they need to manage growing demand efficiently. Together, these solutions create the foundation for a smarter, more reliable learning environment.

Looking ahead

The students writing code for sensors in classrooms today will become tomorrow’s engineers and scientists. Their learning experience should never be limited by weak signals or lag.

As the 2026 E-Rate cycle approaches, schools have an opportunity to modernize their infrastructure and prepare for the next generation of learning. The right network connects more t

– First Wi-Fi 7 deployment by Deutsche Telekom to use Airties Home software to enhance connectivity of broadband customers

– Airties software continues to be deployed across Deutsche Telekom’s European footprint

PARIS – November 4, 2025 – Airties, a global leader of AI-driven software that improves the connectivity experience for ISPs’ subscribers, today announced that it has been deployed to support Deutsche Telecom’s first Wi-Fi 7 launch for consumers across Germany. Today’s announcement builds upon the longstanding relationship between the two companies in which Airties provides managed connectivity solutions to Deutsche Telekom.

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies. Airties empowers broadband service providers to deliver smooth, smart connectivity for all. Across the globe, ISPs rely upon Airties’ software for the ongoing optimization of their customers’ broadband experience to help reduce churn, attract new customers, lower operating and support costs, and innovate in new ways. Airties’ AI-driven insights, across devices and applications, helps ISPs improve performance quality, market effectively, and deliver a premium managed broadband experience to consumers.

“Launching Wi-Fi 7 in Germany, as part of a fully managed Wi-Fi experience, demonstrates our unwavering commitment to provide exceptional speed, connectivity, and reliability to our customers,” said Pedro Bandeira, Senior Vice President of Product and New Business at Deutsche Telekom. “We continue to rely upon Airties to help improve home connectivity, and we look forward to working with them, and all our partners, to launch Wi-Fi 7 to more of our customers.”

“We’re honored that Deutsche Telekom has deployed Airties to support their first Wi-Fi 7 launch across Germany,” said Metin Taskin, CEO and founder of Airties. “Our multi-year relationship is based on a mutual understanding that providing optimized and high-quality home connectivity is paramount to today’s consumers. Deutsche Telekom’s customers deserve the best possible performance across all of their devices and applications, which is what Airties Home was designed to help deliver.”

Airties Home directs consumers’ devices (laptops, tablets, phones, game consoles, IoT, smart home devices, etc.) to the best available Wi-Fi access point and frequency band based on real-time network conditions; manages Mesh networking; and optimizes QoS. It also helps ISPs observe, diagnose, and fix in-home connectivity issues automatically or through actionable recommendations; delivers insights and optimizations for connected devices and applications; and provides intuitive dashboards and APIs to support operators’ CRM systems and customer facing support apps to manage their home networks, set parent controls, prioritizations, guest access, and more.

Airties has received many prestigious industry awards for its innovations, including: “Best Home Wi-Fi Solution Award” from Broadband World Forum; “Best Wi-Fi Service Provider Solution” and “Best Home Wi-Fi Product” awards from Wi-Fi NOW; “Best Wi-Fi Innovation” and “Best-In Home Wi-Fi Network” awards from Wireless Broadband Alliance; “Best Broadband Customer Experience” from Cable & Satellite International; “Top Contributor Award” from the prpl Foundation, and numerous others.

Additional information about the Airties can be found at: www.Airties.com. Additional information about Deutsche Telekom can be found at https://www.telekom.com/en.

Exec Talk article by Shahnawaz Siraj, Director of Technology | Intelligent Connectivity at MediaTek

AI is transforming industries, and without exception, it has become the buzzword of networking. While vendors and equipment manufacturers are pitching the same AI use cases for networking, such as configuration management, self-driving networks, anomaly detection, application visibility and QoS, and location services, the real differentiation in the execution – how reliably and at scale these solutions work.

On end-user devices, the role of AI is obvious: live translation, image editing, and voice assistants. In the cloud, it’s even clearer: the cloud is the “ocean” where all the data flows, it is where centralized AI workloads can see the big picture, correlating patterns across millions of devices and networks. That’s what enables use cases like anomaly detection and others.

The harder question has been how AI is reshaping the edge, and in particular, the Wi-Fi edge.

In the home, the gateway is the logical edge compute point before traffic heads to the cloud, especially now that integrated Wi-Fi has become the standard.

When it comes to the enterprise, the definition of “edge” can be less clear: is it the WAN edge (SD-WAN/secure gateway), or the Wi-Fi access points where client devices connect? If we extend the home analogy, the WAN edge remains the logical place for heavier AI workloads.

It best addresses the key concerns of data immediacy, real-time responsiveness, latency, privacy, and network bandwidth efficiency.

Which then raises the harder question: what’s the unique role of APs (Access Points) in AI at the edge?

The reality is that the industry hasn’t yet landed on a breakthrough “AI-on-AP” use case, and that’s fine. The role of the AP isn’t limited to running AI itself, but also to be ready for the traffic shifts AI will create, through programmability, better QoS, and more flexible platforms. That’s where APs can make a real impact and this is where the conversation turns 180 degrees. It’s not just AI for Wi-Fi, but also Wi-Fi for AI.

Are Wi-Fi networks ready for the new, unpredictable traffic patterns that AI applications will generate? End devices will keep getting smarter and running more inference locally, but that won’t reduce the demand on networks. Instead, it will create new and unpredictable patterns: burst of high-throughput or latency-sensitive traffic and dynamic flows across devices and the cloud. That means Wi-Fi’s role is not just more bandwidth, but resilience, adaptability, and future-proofing against traffic we can’t yet define today.

The industry is also moving to standardize this space. Within IEEE 802.11, the AI/ML group is set to explore how AI can be embedded into Wi-Fi. There are use cases being discussed to enhance WLAN performance, for example, the AP can leverage dynamic capabilities of AI/ML to assist STAs in proactively selecting optimal configuration parameters. In parallel, there are use cases focused on enabling AL/ML itself over WLAN, for example, supporting federated learning across Wi-Fi networks.

At MediaTek, as an innovation and technology leader, we see ourselves as enablers. We develop and provide the complete platform, hardware and software together, along with the SDKs, tools, and reference use cases that let our partners and customers innovate further. Whether it’s optimizing QoS using AI, enabling hooks for edge analytics and troubleshooting, or preparing APs for workloads that haven’t even been imagined yet, our goal is to make sure Wi-Fi isn’t just keeping up with AI, but empowering it.

The future of AI will depend on the networks that carry it. And Wi-Fi, more than ever, is at the front line.

– First Wi-Fi 7 deployment by Deutsche Telekom to use Airties Home software to enhance connectivity of broadband customers

– Airties software continues to be deployed across Deutsche Telekom’s European footprint

PARIS – November 4, 2025 – Airties, a global leader of AI-driven software that improves the connectivity experience for ISPs’ subscribers, today announced that it has been deployed to support Deutsche Telecom’s first Wi-Fi 7 launch for consumers across Germany. Today’s announcement builds upon the longstanding relationship between the two companies in which Airties provides managed connectivity solutions to Deutsche Telekom.

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies. Airties empowers broadband service providers to deliver smooth, smart connectivity for all. Across the globe, ISPs rely upon Airties’ software for the ongoing optimization of their customers’ broadband experience to help reduce churn, attract new customers, lower operating and support costs, and innovate in new ways. Airties’ AI-driven insights, across devices and applications, helps ISPs improve performance quality, market effectively, and deliver a premium managed broadband experience to consumers.

“Launching Wi-Fi 7 in Germany, as part of a fully managed Wi-Fi experience, demonstrates our unwavering commitment to provide exceptional speed, connectivity, and reliability to our customers,” said Pedro Bandeira, Senior Vice President of Product and New Business at Deutsche Telekom. “We continue to rely upon Airties to help improve home connectivity, and we look forward to working with them, and all our partners, to launch Wi-Fi 7 to more of our customers.”

“We’re honored that Deutsche Telekom has deployed Airties to support their first Wi-Fi 7 launch across Germany,” said Metin Taskin, CEO and founder of Airties. “Our multi-year relationship is based on a mutual understanding that providing optimized and high-quality home connectivity is paramount to today’s consumers. Deutsche Telekom’s customers deserve the best possible performance across all of their devices and applications, which is what Airties Home was designed to help deliver.”

Airties Home directs consumers’ devices (laptops, tablets, phones, game consoles, IoT, smart home devices, etc.) to the best available Wi-Fi access point and frequency band based on real-time network conditions; manages Mesh networking; and optimizes QoS. It also helps ISPs observe, diagnose, and fix in-home connectivity issues automatically or through actionable recommendations; delivers insights and optimizations for connected devices and applications; and provides intuitive dashboards and APIs to support operators’ CRM systems and customer facing support apps to manage their home networks, set parent controls, prioritizations, guest access, and more.

Airties has received many prestigious industry awards for its innovations, including: “Best Home Wi-Fi Solution Award” from Broadband World Forum; “Best Wi-Fi Service Provider Solution” and “Best Home Wi-Fi Product” awards from Wi-Fi NOW; “Best Wi-Fi Innovation” and “Best-In Home Wi-Fi Network” awards from Wireless Broadband Alliance; “Best Broadband Customer Experience” from Cable & Satellite International; “Top Contributor Award” from the prpl Foundation, and numerous others.

Additional information about the Airties can be found at: www.Airties.com. Additional information about Deutsche Telekom can be found at https://www.telekom.com/en.

The 3GPP specifications define two types of

non-3GPP access: trusted and untrusted. Non-3GPP access includes technologies such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX, fixed-line, and CDMA networks.

In the next three posts, we will explore the differences between trusted and untrusted 3GPP Wi-Fi Access and the various 3GPP standard methods for integrating these access types with cellular networks across different cellular generations (3G/4G/5G). We will only focus on 4G and 5G as the methods for 3G are essentially the same as for 4G, only with different names on the 3GPP nodes.

The numerous acronyms introduced with each new 3GPP release can be overwhelming and confusing. We’ve provided a ‘translation table’ to assist those of you already familiar with the terminology for 3G, 4G, or 5G.

Please note that these are simply ‘functions’ that may be delivered as a combined solution with one or more nodes, deployed as containerized functions, or integrated into the same virtual or physical gateway node.

Trusted 3GPP Wi-Fi Access

Trusted non-3GPP (Wi-Fi) access was first introduced with the LTE standard in 3GPP Release 8 (2008). Trusted access typically refers to operator-managed Wi-Fi networks that use encryption (enabled by 802.1x) within the Wi-Fi radio access network (RAN) and secure authentication methods like EAP.

In the case of trusted access, the user device (UE) connects through a Wireless Access Gateway (WAG/TWAG/TNGF/TWIF) in the Wi-Fi core. The gateway, in turn, establishes a secure tunnel directly with the Packet Gateway (GGSN/P-GW/UPF), which is also used for cellular traffic in the Mobile Core. For 5G standalone (5G SA) architectures, a null-encrypted tunnel is utilized between the device and the TNGF/TWIF—more details on this can be found in the Wi-Fi and 5G convergence section.

SIM authentication (EAP-SIM/AKA/AKA′ or 5G-AKA), performed by a 3GPP AAA server, is crucial for trusted non-3GPP access. Beyond authenticating, the device for access to the Wi-Fi network, it also generates cryptographic keys used for the Wi-Fi encryption (WPA2/WPA3).

Untrusted 3GPP Wi-Fi Access

Untrusted non-3GPP (Wi-Fi) access was first introduced in the Wi-Fi specification of 3GPP Release 6 (2005). At that time, Wi-Fi access points with advanced security features were uncommon, so Wi-Fi was generally considered open and unsecured by default.

Untrusted access refers to any Wi-Fi network over which the operator has no control, including public hotspots, subscribers’ home Wi-Fi, and corporate Wi-Fi networks. This also encompasses Wi-Fi networks that lack adequate security mechanisms, such as EAP authentication and radio link encryption (802.1x enabling WPA2/WPA3-Enterprise encryption). Conversely, a Wi-Fi network using EAP and 802.1x outside the operator’s control, for instance, an Enterprise Wi-Fi network, is still considered untrusted.

The flexibility of untrusted non-3GPP access, which works over any Wi-Fi network, makes it the preferred method for services like Wi-Fi Calling (aka Voice over Wi-Fi).

The untrusted model requires no modifications to the Wi-Fi network itself but does impact the device side, as an IPsec client must be deployed natively on the device. The device connects through a secure IPsec tunnel directly to an IPsec Termination Gateway (TTG/ePDG/N3IWF) in the Mobile Core, which is then linked through an encrypted tunnel to the Packet Gateway (GGSN/P-GW/UPF), which handles both cellular and Wi-Fi traffic. This integration means that the device must interact with mobile core network components like the HLR/HSS/AUSF-UDM for SIM-based EAP authentication (EAP-SIM/AKA/AKA′ or 5G-AKA) to establish the IPsec tunnel, but not for granting Wi-Fi access. This ensures the same level of authentication security as in the cellular network.

Historically, not all standardized functions—like those defined in 3GPP—make it into real-world networks. Vendors and service providers only implement features when there are strong commercial incentives. The integration of Wi-Fi with 3G and 4G data planes is a prime example. Most mobile operators have implemented local break-out (LBO) for Wi-Fi traffic directly from their secure Wi-Fi networks (802.1x).

Without a compelling operational or commercial rationale for backhauling Wi-Fi traffic to the Mobile Core, operators have instead leveraged secure SIM-based authentication, often paired with policy control from the Mobile Core. This approach avoids adding unnecessary load to the Mobile Core, allowing operators to enforce policies locally through advanced service management systems like the Enea Aptilo SMP.

Mobile device vendors also play a critical role in determining what capabilities are implemented and what functionality that gets deployed into real-life services (Learn more about this in our recent post Wi-Fi Offloading and the Device). For instance, it took nearly a decade for device vendors to adopt the IPsec client required for untrusted Wi-Fi access. The motivation for this change materialized with the rise of Wi-Fi Calling, which served both the device manufacturers’ interests and the consumers. Backhauling Wi-Fi Traffic to the Mobile Core: Control vs. Efficiency In certain markets, some mobile operators choose to backhaul Wi-Fi traffic to the mobile core, mainly for perceived control and regulatory aspects. However, a vast majority (90%) prefer local traffic breakout due to cost and network optimization reasons.

The preference for local offloading is driven by the desire to minimize latency and reduce core network load. There are two primary reasons operators still consider backhauling traffic: Deep Packet Inspection (DPI): By routing traffic through the mobile core, operators can perform DPI to analyze and manage data flows. However, this can also be achieved outside the 3GPP standards using policy-based routing to a dedicated DPI function outside the mobile core. Policy Control, Quota Management, and Charging: Although these functions are managed in the mobile core, there is no strong justification for this approach. A well-integrated Wi-Fi service management system can handle policy enforcement, quota tracking, and charging locally within the Wi-Fi network while still maintaining alignment with the mobile core. Explore our solutions for local policy and charging integration. Learn More About Wi-Fi Offloading Architectures In the next upcoming white paper excerpts, we will cover the 3GPP specified architectures for Wi-Fi Offloading integrated with the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and the 5G standalone mobile core (5G SA). If you don’t want to wait for these posts, go here for further insights on all the different Wi-Fi offloading architectures, and to learn why a standard 3GPP AAA function is not enough for effective Wi-Fi offloading.