With eye on streaming future, u-mee teams up with Amazon for new product launch

When local internet service provider u-mee launched its latest product earlier this month, it was the culmination of nearly three years of negotiation with global tech giant Amazon in the UK, Luxembourg and Silicon Valley. The result is a deal that is delivering cutting edge WiFi and internet technology to the company’s customers in Gibraltar, and in the process opening new future opportunities in this highly competitive sector.

Typically, it is difficult for Gibraltar-based companies to attract big global players to the Rock, where the small size of the market may not be worth their while.

But that small size also offers opportunities in that Gibraltar can, in effect, become “a petri dish” offering insights that can potentially then be rolled out on a larger scale.

According to the last market report, u-mee has at least 28% of the market share for residential business in Gibraltar, though the figure is higher depending on the area of the Rock. In some of the new housing estates, for example, the company estimates it has over 60% share.

Gibraltar’s tight density presents a challenge for ISPs because the close proximity of different WiFi devices increases the chances of interference, leading to slower download speeds.

u-mee’s new WiFi service uses the 6 GHz band, which had not been used by an ISP here previously, and Amazon technicians did “quite a lot of tweaking” to address the Gibraltar-specific conditions before the rollout in recent weeks.

What the tech company learnt here has now been rolled out to other eero uses around the world.

“What they've done with us has gone out as a new update for all the eeros, literally millions around the world,” said u-mee spokesperson Jimmy Imossi.

As part of the launch, u-mee assembled all its services – one gigabit fibre broadband internet, top-end WiFi equipment in the home and a TV offering – under a new product called Smart Broadband.

Every customer now has gigabit upload and download speeds, something previously reserved for the company’s top tier customers.

The bundle, which also includes landline telephony, is priced £59 a month. That means some customers who previously had older, slower packages will pay £10 more.

The biggest change is the introduction of Amazon’s eero tri-band mesh WiFi, with every customer receiving an eero Pro 6E device worth nearly £250 at UK retail prices as part of their package.

The eero uses the 6GHz band and the result is reduced congestion from nearby WiFi networks, alongside faster wireless speeds with the latest phones and devices.

“Today, the vast majority of devices, such as smartphones, are wirelessly connected to the internet and the user experience is typically restricted by a bottleneck in performance between the ISP’s router and the wireless device,” said Mr Imossi.

With the eero device, “the speed goes up to the full gig, so you're no longer bottlenecked.”

“All your devices can take full use of the capacity that we provide you with, as long as long as your device can actually cope with it.”

The intelligent system also allows u-mee technicians to support connection issues right up to every wirelessly connected device.

The product includes a subscription to ‘eero Secure’, a premium service to help keep connected devices secure with advanced parental controls, active threat protection, ad blocking, scheduling for individual devices and the ability to create guest networks.

While individual mobile devices also allow for parental controls, the difference here is that the restrictions kick in at the WiFi access point.

“I’ve got one of these things in my house and my kids at bedtime lose their WiFi,” Mr Imossi said, by way of example.

The eero Pro 6E device also acts as a hub compatible with the ‘Matter’ Internet of Things standard supported by Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung and other major players in the smart device sector.

For u-mee, it means its customers are well-placed going forward as smart homes become increasingly common and growing numbers of devices are connected to residential WiFi networks. In time, there may be scope too to incorporate new Amazon products in future packages.

“Our customers demand the best residential broadband experience and entrust the delivery to u-mee,” said u-mee chairman Lawrence Isola, said.

“We take care of the complex technical aspects, including selecting and implementing the latest technologies to suit our market and users, whilst also making all of the best features available to every single customer.”

“We’re proud to have worked with Amazon’s amazing eero team on this project, which required them to address complex issues with their own partners around the world, and we look forward to a long and fruitful partnership.”

The unrestricted gigabit fibre technology as standard means the u-mee does not even market speed as a key feature of the product, taking it as a given that people understand that with the capacity on offer, coupled to the eero technology, “you set this up and it just works”.

The eero allows for a mesh system to ensure good coverage even in large homes.

This is different to how a normal router booster works, in that the mesh system is “intelligent” and will pass users from one device to the next, without the any interference or drop in the connection.

“One of the things it does is check the surrounding frequencies every 15 minutes, so if there is interference, if someone switches on a new device and starts causing interference, it'll change its own channel to the optimal channel to reduce that interference,” Mr Imossi said.

u-mee has also updated its TV platform with a new user interface providing access to features such as favourite channels and locally-trending programmes.

Additionally, a new WiFi version of its 2nd-generation TV set-top box is now available, no longer requiring an ethernet network connection or HomePlug devices.

The company’s Smart DNS is now also included for every Smart Broadband customer as standard, effectively putting the connected device in the country that a user needs to be in to connect to a specific service.

That means users can access services including streaming that would not otherwise be available in Gibraltar.

For u-mee, this effectively future proofs their customers as major media platforms increasingly move to streaming services to deliver their content.

And while the company has changed the TV interface, the focus is on bandwidth and the new WiFi equipment, not on channels.

“It's a known fact that there is uncertainty about Gibraltar companies’ ability to licence all these channels,” said u-mee director Carsten Kjeldsen.

“But this product, with the increase in bandwidth and also with the stability of the WiFi capability, combined with the Smart DNS service, allows people to manage the interim period and to make sure that if becomes a bigger issue, they now have a chance to choose and pay for what they want.”

“So the dependency on TV becomes less and less.”

The roll-out of the new devices to u-mee's existing customers has been under way now for some weeks, with the product opened up to new customers on December 1.

The company is working with the Royal Gibraltar Post Office to get devices to customers even under the pressure of Christmas deliveries.

“I would also take this opportunity to thank the Royal Gibraltar Post Office for its appetite to collaborate with us in developing a modern, trackable delivery system to address thousands of deliveries in a short timescale at such a busy time of the year,” Mr Isola said.