The Mist team consists of leading experts in wireless, machine learning, and cloud, who are responsible for building the largest and most advanced networks in the world. Founded in June 2014, the company is based in Cupertino, CA and funded by top investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Cisco Investments.

Mist built the first wireless platform for the Smart Device era. By taking a user-first approach to networking, the Mist Intelligent Wireless Cloud (IWC) eliminates the operational burdens of legacy wireless architectures by replacing human interaction with machine learning and proactive automation.

Legacy Wireless LAN (WLAN) systems were all built prior to the invention of Smartphones and the modern cloud. As a result, they lack the scale needed to handle today’s wireless needs. Furthermore, they still are very manual to manage, resulting in a reactive approach to wireless operations that is expensive and ineffective. Finally, legacy wireless systems don’t take advantage of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for high accuracy location services. They lack BLE accuracy and performance, and are difficult to setup and maintain. Mist was created to solve all these challenges by building a modern wireless platform for the smart device era.

At the core of the Mist platform is our purpose-built cloud architecture, which is the first of its kind to leverage micro services to bring Software as a Service (SaaS) agility to wireless networks. In addition, the Mist Intelligent Wireless Cloud (IWC) leverages modern cloud elements for containerization, elastic scale, multi-tenancy and fault tolerance to enable seamless growth and real-time responsiveness.

Also strategic to the Mist platform are our enterprise-grade Access Points, which deliver the best Wi-Fi and BLE range and performance. All Mist APs have extra radios for collecting data and enforcing policies in conjunction with the Mist cloud, and they contain an expansion port for Internet of Things (IoT).

Mist provides the following services, which can be purchased on an annual recurring basis:

• Business Critical Wi-Fi assurance for simplified Wi-Fi operations and minimized IT costs.
• Enterprise-grade BLE services, for amazing location based experiences without the need for      site surveys and physical beacons.

Machine learning is used to automate many of the manual tasks associated with Wi-Fi operations, such as event correlation and dynamic packet capture. In addition, it is used to constantly adapt location estimates based on changing device and environmental conditions.

Machine learning simplifies wireless operations and reduces the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) common problems by hours or days. This saves the average Mist customer’s cost by 40% or more on ongoing Wi-Fi operations costs. In addition, Mist eliminates the need for onsite visits for packet sniffing and site surveys. As each site visit can cost upwards of $2,000, this in and of itself can justify and investment in the Mist solution.

Currently Mist has one Access Point available: -Mist AP41 (Wi-Fi and BLE) is a high performance, enterprise-grade Access Point for wireless connectivity. It supports 802.11 ac Wave 2 Gigabit WiFi (2 radios for data services; 1 for data collection/analysis), Bluetooth Low Energy (16-directional and 1 omni directional antenna arrays), plus an expansion port for IOT.

Traditional WLAN platforms manage wireless from the standpoint of the network, not the user. They don’t track real-time user state information, nor have the scale or intelligence to do anything with this data. In contrast, Mist has a purpose-built cloud architecture and Access Points that provide real-time visibility into all user states. We couple this with machine learning to automate mundane wireless management tasks and provide proactive guidance for better wireless operations. This saves time and money while assuring a better wireless service for users.

The Mist solution has a Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE) with patent-pending machine learning technology to dynamically collect information from all Wi-Fi mobile devices and correlate events for quick root cause identification.

As we uniquely look at each and every mobile’s user’s RF packets from inside the cloud, PACE can easily identify if the user is having a “time to connect”, “coverage”, “capacity” or” roaming” issue. Or, we can identify if it is not a wireless issue at all – i.e. maybe it is a DNS, DHCP or authentication problem.

Currently one can set service level expectation (SLE) thresholds for all the major things that impact wireless performance, which include:

• Time to Connect
• Coverage
• Capacity
• Roaming

If any of these parameters are violated, you are proactively given insight into the reasons why, top mobile devices affected, and top wireless networks affected.

When a user is experiencing a network anomaly, the Mist system automatically detects it and starts capturing packets in real-time, ensuring accurate data is collected for fault isolation and remediation. In addition, it happens automatically – i.e. without human intervention – saving time and money.

With Mist, you can look at any user’s state over a period of time – a concept known as Network Rewind. This lets you observe events for that client, RF conditions affecting the client, and the quality of service being delivered to that client (among other attributes) for a past time period.

Mist’s patented virtual BLE (vBLE) technology enables an unlimited amount of virtual beacons to be deployed in a physical environment with the simple click of a mouse to move and add virtual beacon.

Mist’s vBLE solution offers numerous advantages over traditional physical beacons, which include:

• No batteries.
• Beacons are easy setup and moved via software (no on-site visit s required).
• No risk of loss or theft or movement from a beacon’s original position
• Building aesthetics are not affected by the deployment of physical devices.
• Virtual beacons are stackable so different applications and tenants can get different messages.
• No site surveys or ongoing calibration required.
• vBLE beacons co-exist with existing BLE deployments, so you can leverage your existing investment.

Beacons are easily setup and moved via the mist UI or via programmable APIs. They are 100% software driven – no on-site visits are required.

Mist collects and stores a variety of location information for zones and individual clients, including number of visits, visit times, dwell times, empty times, and more.

Mist is the only wireless platform in the industry to offer “RF glasses”, which gives administrators a real-time view of the RF environment from the mobile device’s perspective. If a wireless user complains about a Wi-Fi or BLE problem, the Mist platform can be used to easily visualize in real-time exactly what their wireless environment looks like for accurate troubleshooting.

Some Mist BLE services, like zone analytics and asset tracking, do not require an application installed on the BLE client. Other BLE services, like wayfinding, proximity messaging, and personalized greetings do require an application on the mobile device .

No. The Mist environment is self-calibrating, which eliminates the need for BLE site surveys.

Mist eliminates the need for BLE site surveys and onsite calibration, as well as the hassles of installing and managing physical beacons. This saves over 65% of the total cost of BLE deployment in many instances, removing the single biggest impediment to widespread BLE deployment.