Trends and Opportunities
Onboarding of Wi-Fi devices on public networks has been a fundamental challenge for the industry for many years. We are still dealing with captive portals, proprietary implementations and deployments resulting in poor/inconsistent user experiences and fewer connection to Wi-Fi networks.
Hotspot 2.0 defined Online Sign-Up solution and it has been available for over 10 years. However, it has not picked up due to major issues including lack of implementation on major devices, lack of deployments by operators due to cost and complexity it would introduce. Hotspot 2.0 and WBA have had discussions on keeping or removing the OSU.
There is an urgent need to come up with a solution that addressing the critical market needs, for device/OS vendors easy to implement at the global scale, for operators easy to deploy with less complexity and cost and for users easy to use in consistent fashion.
Business Benefits
OpenRoaming™ has a powerful framework that bringing different players in one place and providing them with a platform to solve the problem at global scale.
It can enable onboarding solutions for users by leveraging OpenRoaming framework by bringing ANPs, IDPs, infrastructure and devices.
By using the current OpenRoaming Federation assets, operators and industry players can leverage the available capabilities with PKI infrastructure, partnership discovery thru DNS.
OpenRoaming participants can have access and make use of Federated Onboarding Service without each one of them implementing and deploying full fledge standalone Online Sign-Up service, and thus avoiding cost and complexity.
Expected Deliverables
- Develop a technical framework for and best practice with defining and specifying Federated Onboarding Service that could be implemented on the devices and deployed OpenRoaming;
- Address the market needs by leveraging the OpenRoaming PKI trust model, discovery and federation architecture.
