South America’s Busiest Airport Rolls Out WiFi 6 using WBA's OpenRoaming

The Wireless Broadband Alliance(WBA) on Wednesday announced that travelers, employees and retailers at Brazil’s São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport (GRU) are now able to access the world’s first at-airport Wi-Fi 6 network using OpenRoaming. 

OpenRoaming provides secure, automatic and friction-free access to the Cisco-powered network that is managed by Boingo. The WBA OpenRoaming service will be available to travelers in GRU’s international Terminal 3, using best-of-breed Samsung Galaxy devices.

The service frees travelers, airport employees and other users from the repeat registration and log-in that public Wi-Fi networks often require. Instead of re-registering or re-entering log-in credentials, GRU users will enjoy the convenience of instant network access matched with enterprise-grade security. When coupled with the Wi-Fi 6 infrastructure, OpenRoaming also helps provide a carrier-grade Wi-Fi experience.

Boingo designed, installed and manages the GRU network, which  was the world’s first airport Wi-Fi 6 network when it launched in October 2020. Travelers have up to four hours of free access, including from their older generation Wi-Fi devices, thanks to Wi-Fi’s backward compatibility.

The GRU network features a unified Wi-Fi 6 infrastructure based on Cisco Catalyst access points, controllers, and switches. Samsung provided GRU operations employees with ruggedized handsets and other devices enabled with Broadcom’s W-Fi 6 chipset, enabling them to use Wi-Fi 6 to maximize productivity and responsiveness to passengers whilst different OpenRoaming identities are used to separate automatic access for GRU employees versus guests.