Cablefax Top Ops 2025 - Company Awards Winner for Outstanding Broadband Innovation

Hotwire's Approach to In-Home Wi-Fi Assessments 

Innovation doesn’t necessarily come from remaining within a specific sector. In many cases, pioneering new territory means looking outside the box for inspiration and guidance.

That’s exactly what Hotwire Communications did when it came to creating its new home WiFi assessment tool, a product that not only provides customers with a user-friendly report about how well their WiFi service works in each room in their homes but opens opportunities to upsell, helps future-proof against WiFi failure and augments customer satisfaction. Whereas before when technicians would recommend additional routers to improve network performance, customers often didn’t understand the “why” behind those suggestions because they lacked the data to reinforce it. The tool enables technicians to perform an in-home diagnosis in real time and show—not just tell—customers where their network coverage needs improvement.

“We realized there really wasn’t any other brand doing this. You can run something on your support app that’s self-serve, but no one is walking you through it and it’s not assessing all the rooms of your house. So, we actually started looking at benchmarks outside of the telco industry and we started mocking up our own design,” says Matt Wilson, Hotwire VP of Customer Experience.

“We started with energy companies that do an assessment of your house to see where are you losing heat or AC. They have a bunch of images of your house, and they are red and green depending on where you’re losing that control.”

The team also looked at the auto mechanic and physician sectors to analyze the types of diagnostic checklists they use and when it came to the customer-facing piece, they assessed the presentation of various high-end consumer brands. Hotwire Co-founder and CEO Kristin Johnson “is always encouraging us to compare ourselves to the best luxury brands people love, like Ritz or Mercedes, not just to other telcos,” he says.

While they were researching, Wilson and his team came across a Canadian company called RouteThis, which helps service providers optimize residential WiFi installations, repairs and support. RouteThis had developed a lot of what Hotwire was looking for, and partnering made perfect sense to deliver agility to technicians and easily digestible information to customers.

“Because it was going to be customer facing, we said it has to be simple. It can’t be a bunch of engineering jargon. The risk is going way too complex because there are so many different stats we can get back from an engineering perspective and when you get a bunch of telecom people together you run the risk of, ‘Let’s show all of it and have a crazy report.’ What we liked about RouteThis is they did keep it really simple. The pass and fail were, ‘What can you do in that room? Can you watch 4K video, can you game, can you work from home on a video conference, or can you barely stream video on your phone?” Wilson says.

So far, Hotwire has been using the tool solely for its WiFi installs in new homes. Since launch in February, “we surveyed the customers and we’ve had better NPS,” Wilson says. “And we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from technicians and their supervisors, that this just makes it more standard. It isn’t really open to interpretation. You’re getting a report and it’s really obvious where the WiFi is good. And we are having some good upsell benefits because we are pointing out coverage gaps and making a case to the customer about why it would be a good idea to have additional WiFi coverage—and we have a few products for that.”

As the team builds on some of the engineering behind the diagnostics, expansion plans are also under way. “Right now, it’s a simple version, and we started in our line of business where homes are new construction, and our idea is to expand this or a next generation, where there are more engineering tests with it, throughout the footprint,” Wilson says.

“Next would be the properties we convert, where we come in and we become the bulk provider of the property. That would be another great way to elevate that experience. This is the cherry on top, when we go in and do our consult and just surprise the [customers] with something totally different.”

After serving five years in the Israeli military, Elad Nafshi earned a law degree from Tel Aviv University, before adding an MBA from the University of Rochester shortly after. His journey in telecom started in 2000 when he joined RCN (now Astound) to be a Project Manager for the company’s foray into VOD services. Nafshi climbed his way up and eventually took on the responsibility of RCN’s internet and telephony product lines. In 2005, he made the switch to Comcast, a decision that’s blossomed into 20 years of ushering transformation and next-generation technology.

But times have changed quite a bit since the early 2000s, and even more so in the early 2020s. Nafshi has led Comcast through a period of rapid evolution marked by two parallel developments: the rollout of DOCSIS 4.0 and the integration of artificial intelligence across the company’s network infrastructure. Together, these efforts work hand-in-hand in strengthening Comcast’s ability to offer multi-gig symmetrical speeds.

“It’s very rare in a career when you get to really bring out a whole new standard of what high-speed data means for the tens of millions of homes that are connected to our network,” Nafshi says. “When you really take a step back and look at the underlying technology that enables DOCSIS 4.0 … it’s being able to offer multiple-gigabit symmetrical services over the coaxial network, the same network that we rely on today and will rely on into the future, and really enable us to embed deeply a whole new generation of AI capabilities that enable the technology to work as is. It’s just an incredible accomplishment.”

It’s not just about the need for speed; Nafshi and Comcast have invested in making the network smarter. In 2020, Octave, an AI-based platform that optimizes bandwidth across households, was used for managing the pandemic-induced increase in usage on its network. Although it was still newer technology, Nafshi said it delivered a 45% capacity increase at a time when there was three years’ worth of capacity growth in a two-week span.

In the five years since, Comcast has poured more than $20 billion into various investments to make its network more efficient. Nafshi and his team have molded a platform that can identify issues on its own and reduce the impacts on customers. Those self-healing powers are a boost for technicians, too, with additional abilities to better monitor and target things like fiber cuts or power outages.

“The capabilities that we gain by implementing and deeply embedding AI capabilities—whether it’s structured, whether it’s generative or whether it’s agentive, end-to-end on our network—is something that I very much look forward to continuing to push and drive here at Comcast and across the industry,” Nafshi says.

In another example of Nafshi’s leadership, he was elected to serve as Chair of the SCTE Board of Directors in March. It’s the latest feather in the cap of a pioneer who dives into the innovations that customers feel—from cloud TV and digital set-top-boxes, to DOCSIS 4.0 and AI.

Fast Fax

• Hotwire to date has used the home WiFi assessment tool in about half of its new-construction customer homes, or about 10,000 homes.

• The tool uses maps systems to provide the shape of a given house and then the technician walks through and pauses in each room, where the app prompts him/her to name the room and run the diagnostics.

• Hotwire is the first U.S. company to work with Canadian-based RouteThis.

Source: https://www.cablefax.com/event/2025-cablefax-top-ops?id=538257#2025-top-ops-winners