How the mesh Wi-Fi router startup Plume is winning partnerships with some of the biggest US and international ISPs, despite Eero's fire sale to Amazon
Simplified device management might be more attractive than Wi-Fi mesh itself. — Yesterday, Charter Communications* …
Context & Ripple Effects
Plume's ISP push did not start with Charter: back in 2017 it closed a $37M round led by Comcast, aligning the startup with the carrier channel before it had carrier customers at scale. The competitive frame flipped in February 2019, when Amazon bought eero — suddenly the leading independent mesh vendor belonged to a company that sells competing devices and wants the smart-home endpoint for itself.
First-order effects
- Charter and other major US and international ISPs get a white-label managed Wi-Fi layer they can brand and bill for themselves, instead of shipping a router whose software answers to Amazon.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's ownership of eero effectively disqualifies it from the ISP channel — every carrier evaluating mesh now has a structural reason to pick the vendor that does not compete with them, which is why Plume kept raising through the period, reaching a $300M round at a $2.6B valuation by late 2021.
Third-order effects
- Home Wi-Fi shifts from a box consumers buy at retail to a subscription service ISPs operate, moving control of the household network endpoint away from big-platform device makers and toward carriers — an instance of endpoint sovereignty being contested between ISPs and platform owners.
The trend: Managed Wi-Fi is consolidating around carrier-distributed platforms, with ISPs preferring neutral software vendors over hardware owned by competing consumer-platform giants.