For much of the broadband era, the quality of an internet connection was reduced to a single number. Operators advertised faster plans, consumers upgraded their bandwidth, and networks were judged by technical parameters, such as speed, latency, jitter and packet loss. But users do not experience broadband through a speed test. They experience it through a work call that freezes, a TV show that buffers, a game that lags, or a Wi-Fi connection that looks active but refuses to behave.
As broadband competition shifts from a race for higher speeds to one for better experiences, a Bengaluru deep-tech company’s bet on self-healing network intelligence has now carried its India-built products into a larger global orbit through a proposed acquisition by Airties. “The plan speed matters far less than a simpler question: are the applications people use working reliably?” queries Pramod Gummaraj, founder & CEO, Aprecomm Technology (founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bengaluru, with Guharajan Sivakumar, who is now co-founder & CTO, Aprecomm). “That distinction matters more as every home becomes a small digital ecosystem, where a video call, a cloud back-up, a smart television and several phones compete for the same link, while demanding different things from it. A network can be technically available and still fail the people using it”.
It is inside that gap – between the connection an operator delivers and the experience a subscriber actually receives – that Aprecomm has built its business. The company does not sell broadband to consumers. It supplies the intelligence layer that broadband providers use to observe, manage and improve what their networks deliver. Today, it manages more than seven million home and business locations and works with over 50 service providers worldwide, holding a leading position among India’s independent players, while expanding across Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
That foundation is now the backdrop to a significant inflexion point. This July, Airties, a global leader in AI-driven connectivity-experience software for ISPs, announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Aprecomm, which will operate as a subsidiary of Airties, with both founders continuing to lead it.
The origins
From the lab to the living room: The company’s origins explain its focus on the network’s intelligence rather than its raw speed. Gummaraj and Sivakumar met at Atheros, later acquired by Qualcomm. Gummaraj had completed his master’s at IIT Madras and passed through ventures including Arada, a Wi-Fi access-point company, and Savari, which worked on autonomous vehicles using Wi-Fi as the connectivity backbone. Sivakumar held engineering leadership roles at Qualcomm-Atheros and Relay2 and earlier co-founded Engrid Global Networks. Both hold patents in wireless communications.
If a car could read its surroundings, anticipate problems and adjust itself, a network should be able to do something similar. Devices that performed well in the lab, Gummaraj notes, often faltered once deployed in real homes; and because experience is subjective, the company began by trying to quantify Wi-Fi experience in the first place. Aprecomm launched its Virtual Wireless Expert (VWE) for businesses in 2019 and a home version in 2020, and by 2021 was already managing over a million locations. Today, a team of about 70, including professionals with experience at companies such as Qualcomm-Atheros, Cisco, Netgear, and Amazon, supports an international footprint that includes a marketing base in the UK and sales presence across the US, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.
The intelligence inside the home: The distinction Aprecomm draws is between quality of service and quality of experience. Quality of service tells an operator whether technical conditions were met; quality of experience asks whether the subscriber could actually do what they set out to do.
Aprecomm inserts software into the router or gateway and combines what it sees inside the premises with data from the wider access network. The platform is vendor-agnostic, designed to run on existing equipment rather than force a hardware replacement, and has been integrated into more than 200 devices, including routers and gateways. At the centre sits an AI engine, pairing agentic AI at the edge with machine learning in the cloud to model behaviour and dynamically adjust Wi-Fi allocation, a process the company likens to air traffic control; and HISense, its patented quality-of-experience index, blends latency, packet loss, bandwidth and application statistics into a score for each user and device, working from a macro view down to a single household.
The business case, Gummaraj argues, is disarmingly simple: happier subscribers raise fewer support calls, need fewer technician visits, and are less likely to churn and, importantly, buy more products. That intelligence now reaches beyond the engineering desk through AIVRA, a layer that brings data from across an operator’s business into a single interface.
Evidence from live networks: For a company selling to operators, claims have to be demonstrated inside real networks. At ACT Fibernet, both a customer and a strategic investor, the initial deployment covered 250,000 homes, and within 15 days ACT reported an average threefold improvement in Wi-Fi speeds, with over 80 per cent of Smart TVs, 70 per cent of laptops and 60 per cent of mobile devices steered to more suitable channels.
Aprecomm was built with the belief that every service provider should be able to deliver a far more intelligent and reliable broadband experience
At Excitel, the deployment was associated with a 20 per cent reduction in churn, a 35 per cent improvement in first-call resolution, and a 62 per cent reduction in truck rolls. The proposition is travelling. Brazilian fibre provider Nicnet is deploying Aprecomm’s suite, with coverage expected to reach 500,000 homes by the end of 2026.
That confidence extends to the partners who resell the platform. “We believe Aprecomm’s AI-powered solution will significantly enhance value for internet service providers by optimising large-scale network management, cutting costs, reducing churn, and improving user experience”, says Victor Fernando, CEO, OpenGlobe.
In 2025, Frost & Sullivan recognised Aprecomm with its Global Transformational Innovation Leadership Award. Aprecomm also works with technology partners including Qualcomm, Nokia and Edgecore Networks.
A deal that widens the map: The proposed acquisition marks the next stage of this journey. Airties is established with Tier I operators across the US, Europe and Japan; Aprecomm is strong in growing markets such as India, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. “Aprecomm is well-positioned in growth markets like India and Southeast Asia, so we now have an unmatched foundation to accelerate our expansion further across Asia-Pacific and into South America”, says Metin Taskin, CEO & co-founder, Airties.
Next growth phase
Aprecomm will continue as a brand and operate as a wholly-owned but operationally independent subsidiary, with both founders staying on – a structure the company frames as a way to grow with Airties’ backing without disrupting existing customers. Its backers see the same horizon. “Our partnership with Aprecomm has been instrumental in shaping our SmartWiFi solution,” says Ravi Karthik, Chief Growth Officer, ACT Fibernet (India). “As Aprecomm enters its next phase of growth, we look forward to building on this collaboration. With a strong SmartWiFi roadmap ahead, we remain committed to bringing more AI-led innovations that redefine connectivity for homes and businesses”.
With our Edge AI, cloud-native architecture and vendor-agnostic design, we have a strong foundation to deliver smarter, more scalable connectivity experiences to service providers worldwide
For the founders, the throughline is validation. “Joining Airties, the industry’s pioneer and leader in advancing connectivity experience, is a strong validation of the vision that has shaped Aprecomm from the start,” says Gummaraj. “Aprecomm was built with the belief that every service provider should be able to deliver a far more intelligent and reliable broadband experience,” Sivakumar adds.
“This combination brings together Airties’ global reach and Aprecomm’s AI-native platform. With our Edge AI, cloud-native architecture and vendor-agnostic design, we have a strong foundation to deliver smarter, more scalable connectivity experiences to service providers worldwide”.
The path may not be without friction. B2B sales cycles are long and the software has to integrate well with a fragmented base of routers and gateways across operators. And, the proposed acquisition brings its own test: preserving the cost discipline and market focus that let Aprecomm grow in India and similar economies, while operating inside a larger organisation built for a different tier of the market.
In the first phase of broadband growth, the industry rewarded those who could extend connectivity and offer more speed. The next may reward those who can make it dependable, personal and largely invisible. Aprecomm’s proposition is ultimately a quiet yet critical one: the call continues, the TV show does not buffer and the complaint is never raised. For a category long accustomed to selling numbers, an experience the customer never has to think about may prove the more valuable product.