Providing public Wi-Fi across villages, towns and cities, connecting the unconnected and enabling residents, students and visitors access to the internet can provide life enhancing opportunities, improving access to education and personal development and providing the necessary drivers for economic growth by bridging the digital divide.
This is as true in developed societies in Europe and North America as it is in developing countries and over the past couple of years, European municipalities have had the opportunity to apply for a grant from the European Commission to fund deployment of public Wi-Fi for citizens in public spaces including parks, squares, public buildings, libraries, health centres and museums. The goal being to provide Wi-Fi to thousands of municipalities across Europe.
Several municipalities in Belgium recently went one step further, by joining the WBA OpenRoaming federation, which enables them to automatically connect to the Wi-Fi network to guarantee secure access to Wi-Fi and at the same time to protect the privacy of their citizens.
In this iteration, the leaders of the municipalities of Chaudfontaine, Tervuren and Oostkamp, worked with their Wi-Fi providers and their partners to switch on OpenRoaming™.
Please click HERE for access to a free workshop to learn more. 
In picturesque Chaudfontaine & Olne, Cisco Systems, worked with the municipalities to deploy Wi-Fi across locations including the town hall, schools, libraries, parks, sport facilities and more. They were easily able to configure and deploy OpenRoaming across their Wi-Fi footprint, in just a few simple steps. Now, their citizens and visitors can automatically connect to Wi-Fi securely, using the core OpenRoaming service that are supported across the federation. The federation ensures the privacy of citizens and visitors is fully protected through a robust federation-wide legal framework with signalling between federation members being protected by certificate-based encryption.
Cisco provided the equipment to enable the Wi-Fi network and manage the end-to-end delivery of the OpenRoaming-enabled Wi-Fi to the municipality in conjunction with their IT partner, Win. In the proof-of-concept trials all municipalities used “OpenRoaming” as the name of the network (SSID). However, as OpenRoaming leverages standardized Passpoint functionality in user devices and networks, the SSID may be personalized and each network can use the name they prefer.
Cedric Halin, Mayor of Olne commented, “With this technology access to the network is even easier because the user is automatically connected to the hotspot when he reaches another location covered by the Wifi4EU network. As a small city, we are really honored to be the first in Europe to deliver such an innovative service to the community”.
Additionally, Tervuren, a city close to EC headquarters and embassies inhabited by people from 109 different nations is led by IT Director, Denis Rondele. In conjunction with CityMesh, Commscope provided the access points and controllers and Aptilo provided the authentication and security capability, they have deployed 7 sites with OpenRoaming-enabled Wi-Fi.
One of the attractions of OpenRoaming is that EU members can connect using the same identity whether in Tervuren or back in their home city & country – it is a seamless, automatic and secure experience to make the life of all European citizens easier.
Overall, with OpenRoaming end users and municipality authorities can benefit from automatic authentication, secure connections, and have the guarantee of privacy of their data and compliance with all legal requirements, including GDPR. These core capabilities which takes care of issues such as MAC address rotation, user identity protection and GPDR compliance. Demonstrations of this working in practice are shown during the workshop.
In summary, these proof-of-concept trials demonstrate the ability to easily connect to OpenRoaming-enabled Wi-Fi and move between locations and still connect automatically when in range of another OpenRoaming network, whether in the same city, country or indeed when travelling overseas. Deployment is simple in as little as 10 minutes. Working with OpenRoaming federation members it not only means automatic connection, but also security and ensuring user identity and data use remains private.
To find out more about OpenRoaming’s automatic and secure Wi-Fi roaming experience across different municipalities, with fast and reliable authentication please watch the workshop video and check out openroaming.org.
Join the OpenRoaming federation today click here
