The Last Mile Battleground Has Shifted
For the modern subscriber, gigabit speed is no longer a differentiator—it is the baseline. The true currency of subscriber loyalty today is digital experience. However, delivering flawless experiences has never been more difficult for service providers, with service boundaries expanding and complexity growing.
The battleground has moved beyond simply providing fiber to the curb/home. Providers must now assure the entire journey from the device to the cloud. The critical operational gap today is the inability to isolate domains effectively. When a gamer experiences lag, is the root cause the Wi-Fi in the bedroom, the access network, or the application server? Without the ability to distinguish between these domains, providers are left blind, leading to generic, frustrating support interactions with no definitive actions or outcomes.
This isn't just anecdotal; it is a quantifiable reality, confirmed by the findings in a soon-to-be-published white paper. What those findings indicate, based on churn data, is that for the modern user, the stability of throughput over time—the "always-on" experience required for everyday applications—can matter more than raw peak speed.
Today's digital natives expect their service providers to know them. They demand personalized, proactive care—where the ISP anticipates their needs and resolves issues before they feel the impact. The traditional "break-fix" model, where a customer must call to report an outage, is not only an experience killer but can be an economic drain. To protect the bottom line, the industry is, by many indications, looking to pivot to AI-driven models that they believe can drastically reduce costly truck rolls and contact center call volume.
However, this vision of intelligent care is currently hindered by a lack of visibility; in other words, you cannot personalize what you cannot see. While the desire to shift to proactive care is high, the "black box," comprised of the home network and a fragmented device ecosystem, continues to prevent service providers from gathering the granular data needed to feed agentic AI systems.
For years, ThousandEyes has provided extensive visibility into the Internet and cloud. Now, we are closing the loop in the home, helping to move service providers from fragmented, siloed troubleshooting to unified, intelligent operations.
Powering The Future of Broadband Assurance
At MWC 2026, ThousandEyes is moving beyond the "visibility gap" to introduce a new era of ISP intelligence. We are turning the massive scale of our global vantage points—millions of active agents that produce billions of daily measurements—into immediate, automated action.
We are introducing next-generation capabilities for Connected Devices, launching in Alpha and Beta, to help empower service providers to execute on three critical strategic pillars:
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Extending Visibility into the Home: Going beyond the gateway to see the actual device experience.
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Customer Care Powered by AgenticOps: Moving from passive data to active, AI-driven resolution that can provide elastic support supply.
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Partner Ecosystem & Agent SDK: Enabling partners to embed our Connected Devices agent natively into their devices via our new software development kit (SDK).
These innovations are built to help providers pinpoint root causes with surgical precision—whether issues originate in the home, the access network, or the application backend—and resolve them before the subscriber even notices.
Extending Visibility into the Home
With Connected Devices, service providers gain bi-directional visibility into the home environment—understanding not just what is happening at the gateway, but on the devices connected to the network.
In-Home Device Detection and Performance Monitoring (currently in Beta) - ThousandEyes can now identify and monitor devices in the home, including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and gaming consoles. This allows technicians to rapidly isolate whether buffering stems from Wi-Fi congestion, specific device limitations, or actual network faults, helping to reduce the time needed to resolve issues and prevent the shipment of unnecessary replacement hardware.
Wi-Fi Heatmap and AR Walkaround Test (currently in Alpha) - Our enhanced consumer mobile app now features an Augmented Reality (AR) Walkaround Test. This revolutionizes how subscribers and field technicians can identify and remediate issues with Wi-Fi dead spots by dynamically building 3D floor plans and visualizing signal strength. It empowers subscribers to self-serve and gives technicians the tools they need to help get installations right the first time, with the goal of improving Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and reducing repeat truck rolls.
Figure 2. AR Walkaround Test and Wi-Fi Heatmap can help eliminate Wi-Fi dead spots
Expanded End-to-End Correlation - With the addition of in-home visibility, ThousandEyes can now provide expanded coverage across segments to help eliminate ambiguity between internal teams and external providers. Providers can now correlate performance across layers to understand, for instance, exactly how Wi-Fi interference impacts streaming quality, or how BGP routing changes affect gaming latency.
AgenticOps with Intelligent Agent Telemetry
Service providers face a fundamental resource mismatch: support demand is volatile and often surges during outages, while human agent capacity is fixed and expensive. The future of customer care relies on Agentic AI to provide an elasticized support framework that scales instantly to meet demand.
Cisco AI Assistant for Connected Devices (currently in Beta) - For complex cases that do reach a human, the Cisco AI Assistant in the ThousandEyes platform can now act as a "virtual field tech" in the home. It analyzes complex diagnostics and explains root causes in seconds, replacing cryptic technical jargon with clear remediation steps. This can help significantly lower Average Handling Time (AHT) and empower agents to solve problems without requiring user input.
MCP Server Support for Custom Orchestration (currently in Beta) - We are embracing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to standardize how AI agents interact with our data. This empowers ISPs to orchestrate their own custom AI agents—whether built internally or on third-party platforms—to securely query ThousandEyes telemetry. By standardizing this interface, providers can build bespoke agentic workflows that fetch real-time diagnostics and perform reasoning tasks, helping to ensure that their AI investments can leverage our deep network intelligence.
One real-world example of how we’re leveraging the MCP Server is by integrating with the Webex AI Agent to drive large-scale case deflection in customer care. The integration enables the Webex AI Agent to perform a front-line support function by pulling real-time router telemetry to diagnose and resolve issues autonomously via chat. This can deflect routine technical tickets away from human agents, helping to transform support cost centers into scalable, resilient operations that maintain high CSAT even during outages.
OpenTelemetry (OTel) Streaming and Splunk Integration (currently in Beta) - ThousandEyes data is OTel-native and can stream directly into existing data platforms like Splunk. This new integration for Connected Devices unlocks multi-variant correlation, allowing providers to combine subscriber telemetry with CRM and billing data to bucket customers into risk cohorts and drive data-informed decisions.
Introducing the Partner Ecosystem and Agent SDK
ThousandEyes is opening its platform, offering both a software development kit (SDK) and a program that enables OEM partners and service providers to embed our Connected Devices agent directly into their hardware.
Generic Agent SDK - Our agent can now be self-embedded for the first time, helping to reduce time to integrate. This generic agent supports ARM64 and ARM32 architectures, including automatic support for hardware acceleration offered by some silicon vendors.
Self-Updating Agents and Orchestration - Agents now self-update automatically, helping to ensure always-current test methodologies without firmware flashes. Furthermore, new self-service portals empower service providers to customize test schedules and traffic patterns, helping to accelerate time-to-value, and enabling providers to tailor ThousandEyes to their unique operational needs.
Partner Ecosystem Program - Our lightweight router agent is now available for OEMs to distribute through partner agreements. This allows network equipment manufacturers to embed performance validation for speeds up to 10Gbs directly into their routers while offering a free triggered speed test, turning commodity hardware into intelligent assurance probes that are designed to drive higher subscriber retention.
Learn More at Mobile World Congress
If you're interested in learning more about how ThousandEyes is redefining broadband assurance, visit us at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Cisco’s booth, 3D5, or contact us today to see these innovations in action.
Be sure to also register to receive our soon-to-be-released white paper “Beyond Speed – How Service Reliability Shapes Broadband Loyalty.” Learn how measuring service reliability can be an important contributor to subscriber satisfaction and retention!
The products and features described herein remain in varying stages of development and may be delivered on a when-and-if-available basis. The delivery timeline of these products and features is subject to change at the sole discretion of Cisco, and Cisco will have no liability for delay in the delivery of or failure to deliver any of the products or features set forth in this document.