Three million+ Wi-Fi Hotspots
OpenRoaming – Game Changer for Ubiquitous Wi-Fi Roaming
OpenRoaming is a Wi-Fi roaming initiative initially conceived and launched by Cisco but since taken over and today operated by the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA).
OpenRoaming is a Passpoint-based roaming scheme bringing together identity providers (IDP) and access network providers (ANP) into a so-called open roaming federation with currently (Oct 2023) over 3 million Wi-Fi hotspots and counting.
Wi-Fi in the 5G era – White Paper
This is an excerpt from our white paper Wi-Fi in the 5G Era – Strategy Guide for Operators. The full white paper is available here if you like what you read. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
Game changer for seamless Wi-Fi
OpenRoaming Architecture
OpenRoaming Identity Providers
Identity providers can be any organization providing accounts for users. The most common and numerous types of identity providers within the context of OpenRoaming are fixed and mobile service providers. Still, anyone providing a user account can also be an identity provider. Both Samsung and Google are identity providers, and OpenRoaming is enabled by default in all Samsung devices from Galaxy S9 and in Google Pixel phones with Android 11 and above. Apple is largely expected to follow suit.
Game Changer for Passpoint
OpenRoaming is a game changer for the live deployment of Passpoint. The industrywide Passpoint project has been in the works since 2014, but the issue has always been the provisioning of Passpoint profiles.
Now finally, Passpoint is pre-enabled in devices from the factory for OpenRoaming. With this, Passpoint can achieve mass-market success not only in theory but also in practice, at least for the settlement-free use case within OpenRoaming.
Other identity providers could potentially be Internet giants like Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix and public networks such as WiFi4EU and Eduroam. Such companies and organizations would then be able to offer their subscribers auto-connect and secure access to Wi-Fi at participating Wi-Fi networks.
OpenRoaming Access Network Providers
The term access network provider describes the participating venues or service providers who own and operate Wi-Fi networks. An access network provider can be anything from major Wi-Fi service providers to hotel chains, malls, airports, or congress centers. The Wi-Fi roaming can be free or paid – the details are up to the roaming partners to agree upon.
OpenRoaming aims to build renewed popular support – among carriers and venues – for ubiquitous Wi-Fi roaming and Passpoint. We also see a use case for it together with Enea’s Zero-touch Wi-Fi IoT Connectivity invention.
OpenRoaming
How Enea Aptilo SMP Adds Value
The Enea Aptilo SMP (software) and SMP-S (service on AWS) support all features needed for OpenRoaming. The most critical features are support for RadSec, EAP authentication, and Dynamic Peer Discovery (DPD). With these features, you can assume the following roles within OpenRoaming.
OpenRoaming Access Network Provider (ANP)
- Dynamic Peer Discovery (DPD).
- RADIUS over TLS (RadSec).
OpenRoaming Identity Provider (IDP)
- Provisioning of OpenRoaming Passpoint profiles from a Portal or App.
- RadSec termination.
- User authentication using EAP-SIM/AKA/AKA’/5G, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS.
