It happens to everyone. You’re at a conference, struggling to get a Wi-Fi connection while people around you are surf happily. You can see the Wi-Fi access point 50 feet away but can’t connect. Or even worse, you can connect but can’t receive or send any data.

The founders of Mist Systems Inc., a startup headed by former Cisco Systems Inc. and Airespace Inc. wireless executives, think they know what the problem is. “It’s been a decade since anything has happened to the wireless network,” said CEO Sujai Hajela, a former senior vice president of the Enterprise Networking Group at Cisco. Wi-Fi protocols that were developed before the cloud computing and mobility waves hit are ill-prepared to handle today’s in-motion and constantly connected devices.

Mist proposes a solution. It’s coming out of stealth today with a wireless access point and cloud analytics dashboard that combine to automatically adjust to common Wi-Fi connectivity problems while giving IT administrators complete visibility into the quality of the user’s network experience. The company is also introducing a complementary technology that makes Bluetooth low energy (BLE) services available without the need for constellations of battery-powered transmitters.

Mist says its cloud-based management framework manages tackles Wi-Fi service management from the user perspective. Instead of looking at power levels and coverage radii, the service detects which users are having common connectivity issues and automatically adjusts service levels or alerts IT administrators, who can “rewind” through network logs to spot the time and cause of problems. “We are able to understand what’s going on in the network and adjust the RF [radio frequency] environment to improve the experience without IT having to play around with power levels,” Hajela said.

Business consequences

Poor Wi-Fi coverage has business consequences. About 15 percent of guests are typically unable to connect to a hotel’s wireless network for reasons that baffle network administrators, Hajela said. That creates support costs and customer satisfaction problems. Professional sports teams are investing billions of dollars in network infrastructure to lure fans to stadiums. Spot outages don’t go over well when people want to see an instant replay.

The Mist wireless network understands and adapts to each user, their movements, the devices they carry and the content they consume. It also addresses the so-called “sticky client” problem, in which users moving around an office are unable to smoothly shift between access points.

Customers who purchase the access points, which carry a list price of $1,380 plus a $150 annual subscription fee, can connect directly to the Mist Systems Cloud to enable on-demand network upgrades and patches within minutes without downtime or disruption to the user experience. The cloud platform is built on Apache Kafka, Storm and other popular web-scale elements. Machine learning algorithms detect and adapt to the most common connectivity problems.

Virtual Bluetooth

Mist is also addressing another need being driven by the growth of the Internet of things (IoT). It’s figured out a way to virtualize BLE beacons so that they can be deployed and shifted around quickly without the need for physical devices.

BLE is a version of Bluetooth that uses low-power access points, or “beacons,” to provide continuous connections to everything from laptops to wristwatches. The low-bandwidth technology is frequently used to interconnect a large number of simple devices, but it can also deliver targeted advertising messages and enable mobile device users to navigate inside a building the same way they would with GPS guidance outdoors.

The problem with BLE is that devices must be placed by hand and their batteries invariably run out over time. Mist vBLE virtualizes beacons so that they can be placed and repositioned with software. A cloud-based location engine provides low-latency location estimates at high scale to within three meters. Unsupervised machine learning software continuously scans and positions virtual beacons for optimal coverage. The vBLE service is available as a $150 annual upgrade for each access point.

Mist has been shipping products since April while in stealth mode and has already lined up dozens of corporate customers, Hajela said. “Pick any vertical market; within the top three names are a customer or beta client of Mist,” he said. the company has raised $14.4 million from Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company plans to sell its wares primarily through partner channels, so prices will vary.