TP-Link Enhances Its Wi-Fi Services And Offerings On Amazon Web Services

Building on Amazon Web Services, TP-Link deploys an operator-level IoT cloud management platform (the CMP) and builds standardized, customized SaaS applications to provide customers with agile, efficient device management services like managed Wi-Fi service. Amazon Web Services’ stable, highly-available infrastructure, comprehensive security and compliance guarantees, feature-rich products and services, and consistently-responsive technical support have enabled TP-Link to accelerate its servitization transition and create a sustainable, circular ecosystem driven by technology and business innovations. TP-Link is committed to providing the public with the most convenient LAN interconnection and Internet access to meet their growing networking demand. Benefiting from Amazon Web Services’ sound product and service experience, it has continued to expand business to the forefront of innovation. TP-Link is powered by Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR, Amazon RDS, Amazon MSK, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Security Hub, and more.

In overseas markets, TP-Link began to apply Amazon Web Services as early as 2012 to provide consumers with online services including interconnection of IoT products (security cameras, etc.) and device management, as well as value-added services including cloud storage, data analysis and intelligent decision-making, and AI.

Leveraging Amazon Web Services’ global infrastructure presence and comprehensive data security and compliance guarantees, TP-Link swiftly built its business platform to complete global deployment so that overseas users can efficiently access nearby premium services, continuously improving user experience and building brand reputation. Drawing on its successful experience in To C business, TP-Link has further broadened its horizon to the To B market. Through its cloud-based CMP, TP-Link provides operators with standardized device management services in the form of SaaS while delivering personalized solutions to better meet the needs of specific business.

From a business perspective, the TP-Link team hopes to utilize the cloud to (1) greatly improve deployment efficiency by shortening the development cycle of the entire system, and enable more agile access of innovative cloud management services by operators; (2) effectively reduce IT resource-related costs of fixed assets and operation and maintenance(O&M); (3) and more importantly, provide flexible, stable, and highly-available services, and better manage customer premises equipment (CPE) through seamless coordination with operators’ auto-configuration servers (ACS).

Building on Amazon Web Services, the TP-Link team started to develop an operator-level CMP (the CMP) at the end of 2021 and launched it in July 2022. The CMP system, compatible with common industry standards like TR-369, TR-069, and TR-181, is used for EasyMesh topology and advanced Wi-Fi diagnostics. The integrated CMP supports fully centralized management of various devices including Wi-Fi routers, xDSL modem routers, xPON routers and 4G/5G routers, allowing users to control the devices anytime and anywhere through a single interface. It also supports zero-touch deployment and plug-and-play installation on vendor devices without on-site technical support, and can achieve comprehensive network detection, such as advanced Wi-Fi diagnostics for troubleshooting and instant detection of connected homes. In terms of O&M, the CMP provides cloud services for batch firmware upgrades and regular updates of customized parameters and supports agile task execution.

The CMP can monitor device operation status and network quality in real time and diagnose device abnormalities by collecting device logs, and boasts functions like API access and dashboard access. In addition, it also offers value-added services to operators, e.g., aggregated payment, storage of final consumption results in the data warehouse, and efficient, secure search, monitoring and analysis of operational data.

TP-Link uses the following Amazon Web Services: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)、Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)、Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)、Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)、Elastic Load Balancing、Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)、Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)、Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)、Amazon DynamoDB、Amazon DocumentDB、Amazon Redshift、Amazon Kinesis、Amazon EMR、Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka、Amazon OpenSearch Service、Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM)、Amazon Key Management Service (Amazon KMS)、Amazon Security Hub、Amazon CloudFront and more.

Adopting a cluster architecture that spans multiple availability zones, TP-Link’s CMP achieves an optimal balance of stability and high availability. Through Amazon EKS, a mature container scheduling solution to run Kubernetes applications in the cloud, it realizes theoretically unlimited scalability and provides SaaS services that meet operators’ SLA requirements.

Seeing security as a top priority, TP-Link employs on the CMP a series of mechanisms including network access permissions, virtual private cloud (VPC), security group/whitelist processing, ingress traffic control, and elastic load balance (ELB), to achieve across-the-board, sophisticated network control and security policy deployment. With respect to data security, Amazon EC2 encryption between instances, Amazon EBS encryption for volumes and snapshots, and Amazon S3 encryption are enabled to protect data in transit and at rest. And key management service Amazon KMS is used to easily create and manage encrypted keys for encryption and transformation of critical business parameters. As for containerization, Amazon Inspector and Amazon Security Hub scanning mechanism is used to continuously scan workloads for potential vulnerabilities and accidental network exposure, making 24-hour response possible.

Further, thanks to its Amazon Web Services-powered CMP, TP-Link can seamlessly meet the data security and compliance requirements of different jurisdictions covered by its global business reach, and ensures its team can fully focus on product and service innovations, thereby speeding up value realization. In addition, relying on Amazon Web Services’ durable storage infrastructure, the TP-Link team frees themselves of worries about data integrity and availability.

Qiu Honglei, Director of Shanghai Application Services of TP-Link says “Using Amazon Web Services to expand services of the operator-level cloud management platform, TP-Link can update services multiple times in a day and shorten the development time by more than 50%. With security components like Amazon Security Hub, we can continuously scan workloads for potential vulnerabilities and accidental network exposure, making a timely response within 24 hours.”

As a traditional device integrator, TP-Link is widely recognized for its strength in manufacturing and quality control. As IoT and intelligence are all the rage, TP-Link is accelerating its transition to a service provider, evidenced by its building of the operator-level CMP. According to Qiu Honglei, Amazon Web Services allows the TP-Link team to devote most of their energy to R&D without providing complex O&M support for the underlying architecture, and focus on product and service innovations, achieving optimal allocation of resources.

Currently, TP-Link’s CMP development team comprises around 100 people. The team delivers a new product version every month pursuant to TP-Link’s stable release planning. By combining an infrastructure built around Amazon EKS with the DevOps architecture, it performs hundreds of updates and tests every month. In practice, TP-Link can update its service deployment multiple times in a day as managed services like Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS help reduce the team’s efforts for similar function development, saving more than 50% of the time.

Amazon Web Services team provides TP-Link with 24/7 Enterprise Support services, assisting TP-Link to plan and build solutions following best practices, offering insights and recommendations on expenditure, workload optimization and incident management, and helping coordinate plans to ensure proper functioning of the system. The team has rendered effective support to TP-Link in database upgrades and issues regarding the underlying architecture of Amazon EC2, including certain personalized needs, Qiu said. For instance, when an operator requests for private network access, Amazon Web Services’ technical experts will respond immediately, helping the TP-Link team develop an access plan, design products suitable for VPN scenarios, and connect them to the CMP safely and stably.

Essentially, TP-Link’s CMP can enable ISPs to enhance compatibility of device management and reduce customer service, human resource, O&M, and other related costs. In particular, small and medium-sized ISPs can directly rely on the CMP to achieve efficient, scalable device management without building their own platforms; large ones can better integrate the CMP with their own management systems for on-demand subscription of value-added services. Compared to operators’ existing ACS, which supports only unidirectional transmission of instructions from IDCs to devices, TP-Link’s CMP, compatible with multiple IoT device management standards, can monitor the operating status of network devices and the number and quality of CPE in real time, collect various data, and record historical data, facilitating ISPs’ information search and informing their decision-making on troubleshooting and network quality optimization. TP-Link also provides open APIs for customers, allowing them to migrate their special functions to the CMP to further expand the potential of their applications.

In Qiu Honglei’s opinions, building the Amazon Web Services-powered CMP allows TP-Link to create a genuine “win-win” situation. Specifically, shifting from existing device management mechanism featuring unidirectional transmissions to active network diagnosis permits ISPs to better expand network coverage in remote areas, benefiting from supportive industry policies; helping ISPs better manage devices enables TP-Link to expand device sales and integration business in the global market, realizing sustainable growth by tapping into both domestic and international markets.

Looking ahead, TP-Link will follow up Amazon Web Services’ latest computing and container services, including further adoption of machine learning and other related functions. For example, introducing Amazon Timestream, a time series database, to better meet IoT-appropriate data transmission and storage needs and collect device reporting data in real time; introducing Amazon Outposts, a hybrid cloud architecture, to achieve cloud-edge coordination, laying a solid foundation for customers’ extensions of localized customized solutions and services.