Enterprise grade WiFi Is Stalling Here’s How We Unstick It

A quick scroll through MSP forums reveals the same pattern, over and over:

• “My Ruckus controller can’t talk to our IoT gateway.”

• “Meraki licences just jumped again—now what?”

• “TIP OpenWiFi looks cool, but who has time to glue it all together?”

Demand for managed Wi-Fi is compounding—multi-dwelling units, hybrid campuses, private 5G offload, you name it—yet the toolchain is still stuck in 2014. We’re running an F1 race with one brand supplying the engine and the steering wheel, and we wonder why lap times aren’t improving.

What’s holding us back?

1. Vertical silos – Each legacy vendor solves for its hardware, leaving MSPs to juggle half-a-dozen dashboards.

2. DIY fatigue – Open platforms exist, but stitching firmware, telemetry, and support into a stable service is a science project most MSP teams can’t resource.

3. Feature tax: AI RF Optimization, zero-touch onboarding, tenant-level billing hooks… all possible but rarely portable.

The missing link

Every other infra layer has converged on a common substrate, plus value-add flavors:

• Linux ↔ Red Hat / SUSE

• Android ↔ PixelOS / Samsung One UI

That pattern hasn’t reached enterprise Wi-Fi yet. Until it does, MSPs will continue to burn $250-500k k/yr per team to stay multi-vendor-capable.

Where do we need to go

• Open core for parity – A permissive, community-governed base that controller vendors and ODMs can certify against.

• Pro extensions for velocity – Enterprise-grade builds, 24/7 support, and plug-in AI modules monetized via subscription, not per-AP ransom fees.

• Marketplace flywheel – Let specialist DevOps shops publish blueprints the same way Red Hat Certified partners package Ansible roles.

When that substrate exists, an MSP can run a 100-unit MDU on Ruckus today, swap in OpenWiFi tomorrow, and keep every workflow, API, and SLA intact. That’s when managed Wi-Fi shifts from “niche” to default connectivity fabric.

We’re putting our weight (300 k+ R&D hours) behind that vision. If you’re building controllers, AP silicon, or managed services and want to accelerate the transition from siloed stacks to a genuinely open, intelligent DM me, let’s make Wi-Fi boring again so that real innovation can happen.