Five years ago this week… Plume quietly conquered Japan’s cable WiFi market in one fell swoop, piggybacking off a reseller agreement with J:Com to reach ten regional cable operators—effectively blanketing the country’s cable footprint with its OpenSync-powered platform. At the time, it raised eyebrows that Liberty Global, a former J:Com parent and Plume investor, had signed a similarly massive deal just months earlier. With no sign of EasyMesh traction in Japan, Plume seized the moment to embed its proprietary stack into homes, including HomePass and Adaptive WiFi. Fast forward to today, Plume now claims to manage over 2.5 billion connected devices globally—but its influence in Japan has waned as SoftBank and Rakuten rolled out rival smart home platforms, aiming to…