Light Reading | Jeff Baumgartner | January 16, 2025
Evolution Digital CEO Chris Egan on why his company’s investment in Ubiety could clear a new way for Evolution’s broadband partners to differentiate and generate more value from their services.
Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor
January 16, 2025
At a Glance
- How the investment in Ubiety is strategically important to Evolution Digital (00:47)
- How an integration of Ubiety will complement Evolution’s existing integration with Plume (08:40)
- Evolution’s priorities for 2025, including an expansion into Europe with partners such as TiVo and Plume (12:30)
As cable operators watched their dominance in home broadband wane in recent years due to rising fiber and fixed wireless access (FWA) competition, they started to point to average revenue per user (ARPU) growth – rather than subscriber trends – as the metric that industry watchers should focus on.
Though speeds and feeds and (of course) pricing all remain important in today’s home broadband market, many cable operators are putting much more focus on helping customers manage the home network (with an emphasis on Wi-Fi) and boost overall performance. In some cases, operators have sold that capability for a premium or built it into higher-end speed tiers.
Evolution Digital, a company that partners with Tier 2 and 3 operators, is no stranger to this trend. After initially helping cable ops pivot to digital video and later to IP- and app-based video, Evolution added broadband hardware and software to the mix, including a partnership with Wi-Fi management specialist Plume.
Expanding the broadband scope
Evolution’s broadband story took another step forward last week when the company announced it participated in a $10 million Series A-1 financing round in Ubiety Technologies, a company that has developed an AI-assisted platform that enables ISPs to weave more security and monitoring into their broadband offerings.
Investing in Ubiety will help Evolution complement its broadband business with cable operators, going beyond selling routers and gateways and some of the software it has already integrated with those devices, Evolution Digital CEO Chris Egan told Light Reading at the CES tech fest in Las Vegas.
Ubiety’s platform “brings home awareness to the operators or the individual subscribers’ homes,” Egan said. “By putting a dome around the home and allowing the subscribers to know what’s going in on the daily life of their homes we believe is a way for operators to bring awareness to the customers and allow them to increase their ARPU through their broadband service.”
Read more here: https://www.lightreading.com/broadband/evolution-digital-breaks-out-a-new-broadband-arpu-booster