Einy miny myni mo. More like EINO, miny, myni, mo..
That’s how it’s starting to feel while selecting a product for Wifi Design and Surveying. There has been a lot of excitement in this market lately. Innovations are creating some excellent products in this space.
A new comer in the Wifi and Cellular planning tool world is Eino.ai. They have a decent product, although a bit behind on features compared to the others out there in the Wifi and Cellular Design and Survey. Largely, Eino doesn’t have an official survey tool.. BUT they can import survey data, which I’ll get to shortly. They DO have some innovative solutions that lead the competition.
Our short presentation at Mobility Field Day made me excited to test out their product, and I’ve been discovering a few things ever since after having some time to play with it.
Market Competition is Expanding
The Wifi planning market continues to be saturated although healthy. As Ferney Munoz posted a few weeks ago about our testing of 4 different Survey Tools, the design and planner tool market is healthy and growing.
Eino is just another in a long line of survey and design tools. Generally, most Wireless Engineers are only able to afford one or maybe two tools. I’m excited for competition, but are all these tools going to succeed? We will see. Eino has a few things going for them though.
AI Assisted Network Planning
The buzz word that is taking the world by storm is AI. Everywhere you turn, AI and ChatGPT are being integrated into the tools we use everyday. Apple just announced Apple Intelligence. Juniper, who has always been at the forefront of AI and networking, is being purchased by HPE because of their Mist AI.
Eino has built their tool on AI based design to help engineers design networks quicker. That is one of Eino’s big selling points. You want some help building a plan, let’s use AI. Need to add walls? Use AI. The problem with that is the competition are following the same trajectory, using AI.
Eino uses AI for five areas within their design tools. Generate Walls, Generate Obstructions, Generate Demand, Place APs, and Validate Design. I haven’t tested all these out yet. The few I have tested have their benefits over the old way of doing these functions.
My favorite of that list is the Generating Obstructions.. That means CLUTTER DATA!!
Clutter Data
In playing with Eino’s AI, there is one cool thing that no one else is doing. That comes down to generating Clutter Data. Such as the buildings and trees on an outdoor space.
Google Network Planner has the best usage of clutter data that I’ve seen.. because they are Google. But they’ve slowly been killing that product as they are known to do. Anyone who doesn’t have an account, cannot get one at this point. Which leaves a lot of us out in the cold. Eino has an opportunity here to reach some market at Google’s expense.
The next option is to jump up to Ibwave. There are people who’s entire jobs are to understand and use Ibwave. As the industry standard, it’s a good product but cost prohibitive to small shops and most Wifi engineers. You also have to “source” your own clutter data.
With Eino, you don’t necessarily need to go buy clutter data from some source, although I’ve heard you can import from other sources.
Eino can construct buildings from a Google Map just using AI. It’s not perfect as you have to adjust the heights of buildings as all buildins are set to the same height. But it is an innovative idea. Sadly, currently, Eino doesn’t build trees or other objects at this time.
I’ve had chats in the past with some of the competition specifically about clutter data and the big two on the Wifi side have it far down their list of potential features to be built someday. Those conversations have always been about where to source clutter data, cost, and need from their clients.
Eino has it available NOW!!
Eino Wifi and Cellular Design
Out of the gate, Eino has both Wifi and Cellular design. Their original focus was on the cellular side and moved over to the Wifi side later. They have the basics when it comes to designing Wifi and Cellular. As mentioned above, you can build walls using AI as many of the competition are starting to follow suit. You drop an AP and can see the coverage area as expected.
Their list of vendors and APs is still limited, but they are super responsive on importing additional radios if you need them. I had them add Juniper Mist and Extreme APs and they had them imported in a few days.
On the cellular side, they were originally focused more on cellular vendors so their selection is much wider. If there is a radio they do no have, they also request you help them source the antenna patterns for radios you need imported, as those antenna patterns a not as available publicly.
Wifi and Cellular Surveys
This is the biggest space where Eino excels and as well as falls behind the competition. This is where, personally, I’m the most excited for this product.
Eino as I mentioned previously has not focused on building a survey tool. They have focused on strictly building their software. At Mobility Field Day, Payman Samadi, Eino’s CEO, talked about their focus being on sourcing survey data from the OpenIntent project. Jake Snyder talked about OpenIntent at WLPC Phoenix 2024. There are some big hopes that such a project succeeds, but there are a lot of politics to navigate through before that can happen.
While that is Eino’s focus, this opens up some possibilities, for say an opensource project such as the WLANPi or my CBRSPi..
I don’t have anything to announce just yet, but I’m working on this very thing and am close on the CBRS side. I’m also looking at the Wifi side on the WLANPi.
What Eino has created is the ability to grab survey data with whatever device you want. IF the vendor allows you to export the data into a CSV or OpenIntent format, you can easily import it on a map within Eino. With a CSV, surveys are limited to using GPS Coordinates for the X,Y data points. I’m told they are using AI to aid in this process as well.
You also only have to import the KPIs you want/receive. So, you can import RSRP and RSRQ but if you don’t have RSSI, it’s not required. Their AI piece, helps their tools adjust to whatever data you have available. Reports are then created with the available data accordingly.
This opens up some pretty big possibilities that gives Eino an advantage. Anyone can build a survey tool to capture the data then analyze it with Eino. It is not outside the realm of possibility of someone using an Android App to grab the Cellular and Wifi data. They then can import it into Eino and analyze it. That in my opinion is a big opportunity. That means you can get the exact view from an actual device instead of relying on dongles or survey devices with their high powered antennas.
Here’s a sneak peak of what I’ve been working on surveying wise at my house. Those dots are survey points, that I imported into Eino. More to come soon on that front.
Eino in the Future
As I started out, there is a lot of competition in this market space. Will Eino survive is yet to be seen. I think they are doing some innovative things that gives them an edge. I’m sure excited to build some things with their platform and see some of the possibilities.
I’m amazed by Eino AI’s ability to solve some problems that others have yet to approach, such as clutter data. Their gamble on OpenIntent is also something to watch but has a ton of political roadblocks standing in their way. We will see how the market shakes out, but hopefully there is a place for them to play in the sandbox.
I highly recommend you watch the whole presentation over on Tech Field Day’s Website or on Youtube below.
