TP-Link Enhances Its Wi-Fi Services And Offerings On AWS

Building on Amazon Web Services (AWS), TP-Link deploys an operator-level IoT cloud management platform (CMP) and builds standardized, customized SaaS applications to provide customers with agile, efficient device management services like managed Wi-Fi service. AWS's stable, highly-available infrastructure, comprehensive security and compliance guarantees feature-rich products and services, supported by a consistently-responsive technical team. This allows 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 AWS’s sound product and service experience, it has continued to expand its business at the forefront of innovation. 

In overseas markets, TP-Link began to use AWS in 2012 to provide consumers with online services, including interconnection of IoT products (security cameras, etc.) and device management, and value-added services like cloud storage, data analysis and intelligent decision-making, and AI.

TP-Link can swiftly expand its business platform to complete its global deployment running on AWS's global infrastructure, and relying on its comprehensive data security and compliance guarantees, so that its users overseas can efficiently access premium services, continuously improving user experience and building its brand reputation. Drawing on its successful experience in consumer (to C) business, TP-Link has further broadened its horizon to the business (to B) market. Through its cloud-based CMP, TP-Link provides operators with standardized device management services via SaaS while delivering personalized solutions to better meet the needs of specific businesses.

TP-Link 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); and (3) 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).

The TP-Link team started to develop an operator-level CMP (the CMP) on AWS 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 its 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, providing comprehensive network detection, such as advanced Wi-Fi diagnostics for troubleshooting and instant detection of connected homes. The CMP also 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. It offers functions like API access and dashboard access, and 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 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, and Amazon CloudFront.

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.

With security as top priority, TP-Link deploys 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 on the CMP.  It runs Amazon EC2 encryption between instances, Amazon EBS encryption for volumes and snapshots, and Amazon S3 encryption for data security, protecting data in transit and at rest. It also runs Amazon KMS to easily create and manage encrypted keys for encryption and transformation of critical business parameters. Lastly, TP-Link uses Amazon Inspector and Amazon Security Hub to continuously scan workloads for potential vulnerabilities and accidental network exposure, making a 24-hour response possible.

Thanks to the AWS Cloud-powered CMP, TP-Link can seamlessly meet the data security and compliance requirements of different jurisdictions globally, and ensures its team can fully focus on product and service innovations, speeding up value realization. In addition, by relying on AWS's durable storage infrastructure, TP-Link checks the boxes for data integrity and availability.

Qiu Honglei, director of Shanghai Application Services, TP-Link, says: “Using AWS to expand services of the operator-level cloud management platform, we can update services multiple times a day, shorteing the development time by more than 50 percent. With security components like Amazon Security Hub, we can continuously scan workloads for potential vulnerabilities and accidental network exposure, ensuring 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, by building its operator-level CMP. According to Qiu, AWS allows the TP-Link team to devote its time to R&D, without needing to provide 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 percent of the time.

The AWS team provides TP-Link with 24/7 Enterprise Support services, assisting the company 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 system function. The AWS team has effectively supported TP-Link with 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, AWS’s 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 lets ISPs 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 rely on the CMP to achieve efficient, scalable device management without building their own platforms; larger ones can better integrate the CMP into 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 is compatible with multiple IoT device management standards. This helps customers to 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 their 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.

Building the AWS cloud-powered CMP allows TP-Link to create a genuine “win-win” situation, said Qiu. 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 AWS's 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.