Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) announced that the number of OpenRoaming hotspots has passed 1 million worldwide.
This milestone is the latest example of WBA OpenRoaming’s success in providing Wi-Fi users seamless and automatic network access, enterprise-grade security and — with Wi-Fi 6 & 6E— a carrier-grade Wi-Fi experience across multiple locations.
WBA also announced Release 3 of OpenRoaming, launched today, which will make the business and commercial aspects of roaming easier than ever before and importantly, cut back on hundreds of hours of legal and administrative time when establishing roaming settlement agreements.
The 1 million OpenRoaming hotspots span a wide variety of venues, including airports, universities, stadiums/arenas, office buildings and municipalities.
WBA OpenRoaming enables enterprises, device OEMs, service providers and others to offer business users and consumers automatic, secure, friction-free access to Wi-Fi. It offers flexibility to support a variety of biz models and quality of service suitable for their customers. Launched in May 2020, the OpenRoaming platform was developed as a global solution based on a common set of standards to bridge the gap between cellular and Wi-Fi, offering users frictionless connectivity as users roam between guest Wi-Fi networks and public Wi-Fi hotspots, as well as from cellular to Wi-Fi.
OpenRoaming enables venues to get their patrons connected seamlessly and quickly. It removes hurdles to get users onboarded and increases opportunities for engagement. The OpenRoaming standard frees users from the need to constantly re-register or re-enter log-in credentials and provides performance guarantees and quality of experience (QoE) capabilities as users roam between different public/private Wi-Fi realms.
Release 3 includes a significant improvement on the legal and commercial framework providing the ability to implement a new templated approach, making commercial arrangements between federation members simpler and easy to scale. Dynamic settlement capabilities make it possible for rate variations to be varied at peak times.
In addition, Release 3 has been enhanced to include automated tools, reporting and API’s to significantly reduce the overhead for management and administration of an OpenRoaming network, while providing an online portal for federation members to self-serve. Enhanced Identity Proofing has also been enabled so that identity providers are able to meet regulatory and legislative requirements as well as corporate and business needs.
Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of the Wireless Broadband Alliance
In just 18 months, WBA OpenRoaming has already surpassed 1 million hotspots worldwide. That’s a major milestone — one that highlights how quickly the marketplace has recognized the benefits for network operators, infrastructure vendors, device OEMs and end users. It also reflects demand driven by the emergence of private 5G networks requiring simple roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi.
