Trends and Opportunities
WBA OpenRoaming™ standard enabled network and service providers to offer enhanced quality of experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS) to their subscribers, including voice, high-definition video streaming, gaming and more. The number of OpenRoaming hotspots around the world has officially grown to more than 1 million Access Points, and the game-changing roaming federation is showing no signs of slowing down.
The QoS on a given Access Network Provider (ANP) location has always been a challenge. Identity Providers (IDPs) often want insight into QoS to help decide if a roamer should attach to a given location. However, there is the possibility of many different networks offering roaming, operated by a variety of network operators and complicating the QoS level.
The industry requires a consistent framework to provide visibility between Wi-Fi and cellular networks of their respective QoS requirements or their fulfillment.
Business Benefits
This project analyses options to achieve Quality-of-Service-related solutions that exist in the wireless ecosystem today, and to determine how it might be leveraged to share real-time metrics for use in Wi-Fi attachment policy.
This offers a reliable way with insight into a network’s QoS and further helps the adoption of Passpoint, by giving IDPs greater confidence in the quality of the networks their users are attaching onto.
Expected Deliverables
- Develop industry guidelines and determine what could be new or existing metrics (such as Data Elements) are able to convey a network’s current health, and whether these metrics would be useful insight by IDPs determining where to roam, and how to collect them;
- Identify solutions with a set of metrics to determine QoS for the Wi-Fi attachment policy;
- Provide a set of specifications explaining how this information should be shared under QoS best practice with examples that may be through an ANQP exchange, a RADIUS exchange, or through a real-time query mechanism similar to OCSP.
