An update from Wireless Broadband Alliance’s OpenRoaming Work Group –

Dear WBA Community,

The OpenRoaming federation, a transformative initiative designed to enable automatic, scalable and secure connections onto private wireless networks continues to revolutionize the adoption of roaming. This blog details key developments championed by WBA’s OpenRoaming Work Group over the second half of 2023.

User Experience and Device Support:

In October, at WBA’s Wireless Global Congress, EMEA, Mark Grayson, Cisco Fellow and Chair of WBA’s OpenRoaming Working Group shared his perspective on how OpenRoaming is delivering the best user experience. As captive portal conversion rates continue to fall, the native device support for OpenRoaming in Samsung and Pixel showcased a seamless user experience to provide venue specific information for users, leveraging features like “Venue Info URL” even on lock screens.

(Revisit the replay of the event and download the presentation HERE)

Technical Enhancements in Release 4:

October also saw the launch of OpenRoaming Release 4, the latest enhancements to the federation. The capability to use OpenRoaming on moving platforms is one of the enhancements delivered in the most recent update to the OpenRoaming technical specification. More specifically, the service offered by Wi-Fi deployments on trains, planes and ships may be constrained by the use of cellular or satellite backhaul services that are insufficient to deliver the minimum service level guarantees required in all conventional OpenRoaming deployments. Hence, the Release 4 updates to the OpenRoaming specification now allow OpenRoaming access networks to signal identity providers that they are operating on moving platforms and to indicate the service levels able to be supported on those moving installation.

Legal Framework Adaptation:

When it comes to the OpenRoaming legal framework, the legal terms that describe the operation of the federation have been adapted to be technology neutral. Originally the terms had been specific to Wi-Fi and Passpoint, describing the use of Passpoint-defined EAP credentials for authentication and Roaming Consortium Organizational Identifiers (RCOIs) for implementing policy across the federation. With WBA Board having already approved a project to analyse the opportunity to re-use OpenRoaming concepts for supporting seamless roaming onto private 5G networks, the OpenRoaming Work Group took the opportunity to update the legal terms so that the OpenRoaming legal framework can be easily applied to support private 5G use cases.

Another significant enhancement in Release 4 also relates to the legal framework. This framework already includes the baseline privacy policy that needs to be adhered to by all OpenRoaming providers that do not get agreement from End-Users to some alternative set of terms. This baseline privacy policy has been enhanced with terms related to the collection, use and disclosure of location data across the federation. When coupled with existing terms, the baseline OpenRoaming privacy policy now ensures that End-Users can be confident that their personally identifiable information and location information are not shared with unauthorized third parties.

Standardization and Industry Collaboration:

In July, WBA’s Chief Technology Officer, Bruno Tomas, and OpenRoaming co-chairs published an Internet-Draft, aligning the federation with Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, published an Internet-Draft describing the OpenRoaming federation. Internet drafts are the working documents of the IETF, the primary standards development organization for the Internet. Bruno presented the draft to the MADINAS working group meeting at July’s IETF 117 meeting in San Francisco. The MADINAS working group, or MAC Address Device Identification for Network and Application Services, is examining issues related to end-devices implementing Randomized and Changing MAC (RCM) addresses.  In the MADINAS working group, OpenRoaming has been proposed as a solution to meet some of the requirements experienced with the use of RCM and the Internet-Draft shared details of how the federation enables scalable and secure Wi-Fi roaming, even when End-User devices implement RCM.

Participation in IETF Hackathon:

In November, OpenRoaming was back at IETF, in Prague this time, and taking part in the IETF 118 Hackathon as part of the MADINAS Work Group activities. The IETF Hackathon takes place over the weekend before the IETF meetings and is used to encourage subject matter experts to collaborate on solutions that show practical implementations of IETF standards. The Hackathon was an opportunity to analyse production OpenRoaming systems to understand whether the signalling systems could be used to leak privacy information from OpenRoaming identity providers towards OpenRoaming access providers. The hackathon participants deployed four separate OpenRoaming access provider installations and captured authentication exchanges with 15 separate OpenRoaming identity providers, including 3 different cellular operators. Later in the week, the results of the hackathon were presented to the MADINAS Working Group and these are now being used by WBA’s Roaming Work Group to define recommendations that reduce the likelihood of privacy leakage.

Crowdsourced Deployment Tracking:

November has also seen important advancements in terms of how to track and record the deployment of OpenRoaming access networks. One of the most scalable approaches is to use crowdsourced reports derived from Wi-Fi beacons, with Wigle (www.wigle.net) being the premier platform with over 1.1 billion unique Wi-Fi networks in its database. Conventionally this database is searched by Wi-Fi SSID and whereas the search shows that over 11,000 Wi-Fi networks have been deployed with an SSID of “OpenRoaming”, the federation’s automated network selection is not based on SSIDs, but instead uses Passpoint-defined RCOI; where “5A-03-BA-00-00” is used for settlement free deployments and “BA-A2-D0-00-00” used for OpenRoaming settled deployments. What is needed is a massive, crowdsourced database that is able to record the location of Wi-Fi networks that broadcast the OpenRoaming RCOI in their beacon. WBA has been working with the team at Wigle on these requirements and is excited to announce that the very latest version of their Android application (release 2.81) does just that. This is the first step on being able to automatically curate the deployment of OpenRoaming access networks world-wide and WBA is encouraging all its members to download the Wigle application and start recording the location of OpenRoaming networks.

Updates on Federated Onboarding Service (FOS):

Following the April release of the “Federated Onboarding Service (FOS) MRD” exclusively for WBA members, we have successfully concluded the business-oriented phase. Currently, FOS is in the final stages of its phase-1 specification work defining the technical details of architectural components, interfaces, and system flows. WBA is actively analyzing diverse business cases and exploring options to facilitate the implementation of FOS. The results of this analysis are anticipated to materialize in 2024.

Private Cellular – 3GPP and Release 19 Study:

Finally, an update from 3GPP and a release 19 study that is intended to enable support of connectivity on 5G-based private “stand alone non-public networks” (SNPN) in a similar way to how Wi-Fi hotspots are accessed. The November 3GPP-SA1 meeting saw agreement reached on a contribution from OpenRoaming co-chairs Intel and Cisco on the set of requirements for enabling “SNPN cellular Hotspots”. It’s hoped that 2024 will see the conclusions of the study item reached and consolidated requirements then included in 3GPP’s Release 19 roadmap.

Be a part of this Groundbreaking Initiative:

In conclusion, OpenRoaming momentum continues to grow. As the co-chairs leading WBA’s OpenRoaming Standard Group, we encourage all venues, vendors, service providers and identity providers to join WBA OpenRoaming.  Together, let’s revolutionize roaming adoption globally, fostering a future of seamless and secure access on private wireless networks. The journey is ongoing, and the prospects for 2024 are promising.

Warm regards,