Aura: Wi-Fi intelligence that runs on the access point, an OpenWiFi story

OpenWiFi made a promise: separate the access point from the cloud that manages it, over an open, standard interface. No lock-in, any hardware, a shared foundation the whole ecosystem can build on. Nearhop built Aura to show what that promise looks like when a team actually builds on it, a white-label, multi-tenant cloud that runs its analytics on the access point itself, on any OpenWiFi hardware, from a team inside the community.

Disaggregation, proven

OpenWiFi's whole point is the open interface between the AP and the cloud. That interface is what lets an operator choose their hardware and their management plane independently, and it's what lets a small team like ours add an innovation layer on top without asking anyone's permission.

Aura sits on exactly that foundation. The OpenWiFi standard is the shared, vendor-neutral interface underneath; Aura is the white-label cloud and edge intelligence built on top; and it runs across any OpenWiFi hardware, EAP105, EAP111, CyberTan boards, and more, as one platform. The same code manages all of them because they all speak the same open protocol.

Decide on the AP. Send only what matters.

Most cloud-managed Wi-Fi ships every access point's raw telemetry upstream and does all its thinking in the cloud. That is expensive to run and fragile the moment the uplink drops. Aura takes the opposite path, and it's OpenWiFi's open AP that makes the opposite path possible.

Instead of streaming a firehose of metrics 24/7, each AP watches its own processes, logs, and radios, and forwards decisions rather than raw data. Cloud cost stops growing with every device you add, because you're not paying to move and store telemetry that never needed to leave the AP. And detection keeps working even when the WAN link is down, because the intelligence lives where the problem is. Because it all rides on the open OpenWiFi AP, you still choose the hardware.

Catch the evil twin on your client's network

Aura's APs continuously scan the airspace, and the cloud classifies every neighbor against your fleet. When something broadcasts an SSID you manage but isn't one of your APs, Aura flags it as a rogue, and shows which of your APs hear it, and how strongly, so you can physically locate it.

Detection is fleet-classified and org-scoped per tenant, triangulated across the APs that hear the offender, and the alerts resolve themselves when the threat goes away.

Alerts that mean something

Aura runs a reconcile engine, not a spam cannon. An alert opens when a real condition appears and closes itself the moment it clears, so the list you're looking at is always what's wrong right now, not a scrollback of things that already fixed themselves. Every alert is routed to your inbox by email, per tenant.

What it watches: rogue and evil-twin APs impersonating your SSIDs; RADIUS, DNS, and DHCP service reachability; memory and health trends on APs heading toward trouble; and offline or never-connected units that point at provisioning gaps.

Ask your network a question

Aura's built-in assistant answers plain-English questions about the fleet, how many APs are online, how many clients are on each, what's failing and why, so your team gets answers without clicking through dashboards. New techs are productive on day one.

Know what every network is doing

Floor-plan heatmaps show coverage per venue. Drop APs onto the plan and see at a glance where signal reaches and where it does not.

Every device gets its own detail page: live status, uptime, connected clients, and built-in health checks for network services like DNS and DHCP, all on one screen.

Application and DNS visibility show what a client network is actually using, broken down by app and category, so "the WiFi is slow" conversations start with data instead of guesswork.

All of it rolls up into a single network health score spanning AP health, client experience, auth, DHCP, and DNS. One number tells you the venue is fine, and when it isn't, the category breakdown points straight at what degraded.

And when something needs hands-on diagnosis, the troubleshooting tools run from the AP itself, with no truck roll: ping to check reachability from the AP, traceroute to see the path to any target, and blink-LED to find the exact unit in a crowded rack.

The radios tune themselves

Aura runs the radio layer so your team doesn't have to. It picks channels automatically to dodge interference, tunes transmit power to fit each site, and steers dual-band clients onto the band that serves them best. Coordination happens across the fleet, so neighbouring APs cooperate instead of fighting each other for airtime.

Built for MSPs

Aura organizes organizations, venues, and APs in one hierarchy, cleanly isolated per client. It's white-label end to end, Aura is the platform, and your customers see your brand. Fleet operations let you push config or firmware to a single AP or the whole fleet, staggered to avoid mass reboots. Also included: configuration templates, scheduling, client isolation, captive portal, and zero-touch provisioning that brings a new AP online without a site visit.

One platform, edge intelligence, on any OpenWiFi hardware

That's the story we wanted to tell with Aura: the disaggregated model isn't just a diagram, it's something a team inside the community can build a real product on. Open interface underneath, edge intelligence on the AP, white-label cloud on top, hosted in the cloud or entirely on your own premises, and running on whatever OpenWiFi hardware you choose.

---

Aura is built by Nearhop. To see it in action, get in touch at contact@nearhop.com.

Article contributed by Venkata Rao Chimata, Nearhop.