Wifirst Partners with Huawei to Lead a New Era for MSPs with Wi-Fi 7-Powered 10 Gbps Smart Campus Networks
Wifirst is a European leader in professional Wi-Fi and managed network services for businesses. In recent years, the company has maintained its position as a leading industry player by expanding its global presence and scaling its service capabilities. However, with the digital economy growing rapidly, user demand for higher bandwidth and more stable connectivity has surged. Like many Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Wifirst faces challenges such as frequent device upgrades and inefficient Operations and Maintenance (O&M).
Against this backdrop, Wifirst entered into deep cooperation with Huawei. By adopting Huawei's Xinghe AI Campus Solution powered by the iMaster NCE platform, Wifirst has built a differentiated competitive advantage. This partnership not only accelerates Wifirst's own business transformation, but also provides a "technology + service + ecosystem" model that serves as a benchmark for MSPs worldwide.
Wifirst's industry position is built on its continuous business expansion and precise market focus. In 2023, the company's revenue surpassed 100 million euros, underscoring the strong market recognition of its service capabilities. To accelerate its internationalization, Wifirst acquired German service providers HOTSPLOTS and The Cloud Networks between 2023 and 2024, further strengthening its European service footprint and building cross-regional service capabilities.
As of 2025, Wifirst manages more than 450,000 wireless Access Points (APs), with Huawei serving as a key hardware pillar of network services. The company focuses on sectors with large-scale connectivity needs, including real estate, hospitality, education, healthcare, small and medium-sized enterprises, and retail. These sectors cover scenarios such as student residences, build-to-rent apartments, major hotel chains, resorts, universities, hospitals, elderly-care groups, automotive dealerships, insurance providers, and retail chains. Across these sectors, Wifirst delivers customized network connectivity solutions, achieving one of the largest user coverage footprints in Europe's MSP market.
Despite its continued expansion, Wifirst faces development bottlenecks that are common across the global MSP industry. These bottlenecks directly affect service quality and customer experience, emerging as key factors that constrain further growth.
Key challenges include the following:
• Rising pressure from outdated equipment and insufficient bandwidth
Wifirst's existing Wi-Fi 5 deployments are nearing their End-of-Service (EOS) stage, and the aging hardware can no longer meet current performance requirements. In the education sector, for example, the surge in student devices and a fourfold increase in average monthly Wi-Fi data usage per student have highlighted bandwidth limitations in the existing wireless network. This has led to frequent latency and disconnection issues, creating an urgent need for network transformation.
• Suboptimal user experience during peak hours
During evening peak hours, the Wi-Fi 5 network lacks insufficient bandwidth and has coverage blind spots, making it difficult to support simultaneous use of multiple student devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc.). As a result, the user complaint rate during peak hours rises by around 30% compared with normal periods, posing a clear risk to overall customer satisfaction.
• Low operational efficiency and high operating costs
The existing network O&M system is outdated and lacks comprehensive network visibility capabilities. Consequently, troubleshooting relies heavily on manual efforts, prolonging the resolution time—averaging more than eight hours—and requiring significant labor input. This inefficient O&M approach keeps operating costs persistently high and continues to erode profit margins.
To address these challenges, Wifirst has partnered with Huawei, leveraging the iMaster NCE cloud management platform as the core enabler. Through this collaboration, Wifirst seeks to reduce costs, improve efficiency, drive business innovation, and elevate its brand positioning—ultimately transforming from a "network service provider" into a "smart ecosystem builder."
• Cloud management platform for 40% cost reduction and 60% efficiency improvement
Unlike traditional on-premises management approaches, Huawei's iMaster NCE cloud management platform enables centralized and streamlined management through a unified controller. This has become a key competitive advantage for Wifirst. By leveraging the platform's automated configuration management and intelligent fault prediction capabilities, Wifirst has achieved large-scale, highly efficient O&M. Remarkably, a team of just 15 engineers now centrally manages 80,000 Huawei APs, slashing labor costs by 40% and improving operational efficiency by 60%. Furthermore, average fault resolution time has been shortened to under 0.5 hours, and user complaints have dropped by 80%, effectively resolving the long-standing challenge of insufficient labor resources for O&M.
The platform has been rapidly integrated with Wifirst's operations systems through software-layer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), significantly improving the efficiency of importing device features. New services can be deployed in just 72 hours, a dramatic reduction from the three weeks needed in the past. On top of that, the platform also supports quarterly synchronized upgrades, enabling Wifirst to deliver innovations such as Wi-Fi 7 and AI-driven O&M to customers at the earliest opportunity. These advancements have helped drive customer repurchase rates increasing by 25%, with overall customer stickiness improving markedly.
• Value-added service innovation from "basic services" to "high-value solutions"
The global MSP industry is seeing increasing demand for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. In response, Huawei and Wifirst have jointly developed four core value-added service offerings built on multi-scenario product portfolios, driving service upgrades and optimizing the revenue structure:
• Managed Wi-Fi services: Deliver full-lifecycle O&M to ensure network stability.
• Value-added services: Provide application identification, wireless positioning, captive portal pages, and Internet of Things (IoT) integration.
• Managed Software-Defined Local Area Network (SD-LAN) services: Offer managed campus switch services.
• Wide Area Network (WAN) connectivity services: Deliver high-speed WAN connections for customers operating across multiple regions.
These offerings have expanded Wifirst's revenue streams, increasing the share of high-value service revenue from 30% to 55% and enabling sustained commercial growth.
• Joint brand exposure to expand global industry influence
Through a series of high-profile industry events, Huawei and Wifirst have strengthened their joint brand presence in the global MSP sector. At MWC Barcelona in February 2025, Wifirst shared insights on delivering customized connectivity solutions with CXOs from leading global MSPs. At the France CTO Forum in August 2025, Wifirst showcased its expertise in building high-quality cloud Wi-Fi 7 networks. And at HUAWEI CONNECT in September 2025, Wifirst's CTO addressed more than 500 global partners, explaining how Wifirst and Huawei have built 10 Gbps networks to usher in an intelligent future. These coordinated marketing initiatives have fostered a virtuous cycle of technology, services, and ecosystem development.
As Wi-Fi 7, AI-driven O&M, and cloud-native networking technologies continue to mature, the global MSP industry is embracing new opportunities. Against this backdrop, Wifirst will further deepen its collaboration with Huawei and invest in technology innovation, service upgrade, and ecosystem development to deliver best-in-class network services to a broader range of industry customers. Meanwhile, both companies are calling on more MSPs and telecom service providers to join the intelligent network ecosystem—fostering collaborative growth and accelerating the digital transformation of the global communications sector.
