Resource Centre

WBA CTO Innovation Forum

The Innovation Forum is a unique gathering of industry technology leaders with the ambition of shaping the future of the Wi-Fi industry and to accelerate the development of the industry roadmap which will accelerate adoption of world leading Wi-Fi services across carriers, enterprise and consumers.

IMSI Privacy Protection for Wi-Fi

EAP methods are primarily used by wireless carriers and operators who want to take advantage of Wi-Fi capabilities for their SIM subscribers for use cases including licensed mobile radio service; in service-environments such as sports or shopping venues; underground locations; and the overall experience for end-users when Wi-Fi and mobile services are combined for the SIM subscriber’s benefit. Passpoint enables the cellular carrier to offload data by providing a means to have an automated connection to available Wi-Fi providers.

To fill the industry gap, it is important to provide solutions that enable mobile devices to keep their permanent subscriber identity (IMSI) private when using SIM authentication methods.

WBA’s IMSI Privacy Protection for Wi-Fi – Technical Specification document serves as the standardization for seamless, private and secure access for SIM-based devices onto to Wi-Fi. The document provides clear guidelines to ensure that service providers can deploy secure and interoperable Wi-Fi services with confidence.

With the joint collaboration between operators and vendors, the WBA’s Wi-Fi IMSI Privacy Protection project team formulated the best practice on security policy and privacy protection on SIM-based devices as well as developed guidelines and a compliance program to guarantee broad industry deployments and alignment

5G and Wi-Fi RAN Convergence Whitepaper – Executive Summary

Convergence between Wi-Fi and cellular access technologies is critical to the long-term success of 5G. That is according to WBA’s 5G and Wi-Fi RAN Convergence whitepaper, developed with input from mobile carriers, Wi-Fi providers, telecom manufacturers, and its own 5G Working Group.

The report is expanding on the WBA and NGMN RAN convergence whitepaper from 2019 which articulated the potential benefits and use-cases of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G convergence, provides a breakdown of the current standards and key business opportunities for operators with this technology.

Onboarding Evolution

Passpoint introduced seamless, automatic and secure authentication, initiating an important change from password-based networks to a disruptive experience, in which the end-user would simply be connected.

In an effort to support today’s data security trends and simplify roaming solutions, the move to WBA OpenRoaming^TM has seen a noticeable increase over the last few months within the Wi-Fi industry. The latest achievement was the launch of WBA OpenRoaming, a global Wi-Fi roaming federation that enables a seamless and secure connection to Wi-Fi among a trusted network of roaming partners.

The whitepaper “Onboarding Evolution – User Engagement in WBA OpenRoaming™ Era” explains the difference between what happens on a network authentication and interconnection level, from the software layer that can be added on top of it. It examines how OpenRoaming and Captive Portal work together on different layers and at different stages of the Wi-Fi onboarding process.

WBA’s previous white paper, “Captive Network Portal Standards” defines some existing use cases, aligns user experience (UX), presents practices to consider and provides suggested guidelines for future features that can be adopted as a unified standard by client devices, client manufacturers and network hardware manufacturers.

OpenRoaming Smart Cities

The use of Wi-Fi across cities and the public sector has grown in popularity since the early noughties/2000’s, reinforced with the recent COVID19 Pandemic. From outdoor public spaces, to indoor municipal use in areas such as libraries and public spaces in offices and education, society’s increasing reliance on staying connected at all times and wanting constant access to information on the move demands a great customer experience. That is without mentioning smart city enablement!

WBA has created a roaming federation service called OpenRoaming™ which addresses these issues by providing all the building blocks necessary to enable a Smart City for public Wi-Fi and other public services. Citizens are able to stay connected in virtually any location across the city while not having to worry about potential security risks, ensuring cities and public spaces are more friendly to businesses, visitors and residents alike, enabling a city of innovation.

OpenRoaming Hospitality

In recent years, Wi-Fi availability is rated as one of the top 3 factors why a guest will choose to stay at a hotel. For hotels around the world, providing a great guest Wi-Fi experience is not optional, its essential.

To that end, what defines a great guest Wi-Fi experience, and are you delivering it? Your guests may have great connectivity in their bedroom or in the hotel bar, but what about in the conference center with many people trying to simultaneously connect? Are your staff required to be connected to Wi-Fi in order to better serve your customers?

OpenRoaming provides seamless, secure access throughout the property, to other properties and other places your guests visit throughout their journey and OpenRoaming can enhance your loyalty proposition.

OpenRoaming Ground Transportation

What happens when our day is paused? The majority of people on different modes of public transportation – such as a train or bus – will immediately reach for their smartphone or tablet – whether it’s to check messages, to do some work or just to enjoy some entertainment while having some downtime.

However, problems can arise the moment you attempt to connect to the transportation’s Wi-Fi network. How do I connect? Do I need a username or password? Will the network recognize me from my previous connections? Should I worry about security risks?

This is where WBA OpenRoaming comes in. It is designed to drastically simplify how passengers and staff connect to the network, with no lengthy and repetitive sign-up or connection process required. From carriage to platform to subway and beyond, connecting to the network happens simply and securely without any further actions needed from the user.

WBA Annual Industry Report 2021

2021 promises to be a significant year in the world of Wi-Fi, according to this years’ WBA Annual Industry Report. With COVID-19 and global lockdowns, 2020 has been a challenging year which has reinforced the important role that Wi-Fi has to play in keeping the world connected. During lockdown, traffic patterns inevitably shifted from an office setting to a home setting, with many cellular and broadband providers seeing massive, sustained increases in traffic across residential areas. The stability of Wi-Fi has arguably been the unsung hero of this situation – it has kept a lot of things moving and working at a time when failure would have resulted in a much bleaker situation for people and business.

As 2021 unfolds Wi-Fi will be important to businesses and consumers in many different ways, and the richness and diversity of services it enables are growing in line with new spectrum, standards and business models.

With Wi-Fi 6 going mainstream in 2021 and Wi-Fi 6E developments closely following, these final results highlight how the Wi-Fi platform is constantly evolving and so enabling additional services and business cases. Despite the challenges of 2020, the clear roadmap to next generation standards – with enriched spectrum, OpenRoaming and convergence with 5G – is clearly instilling high levels of confidence in Wi-Fi to support a very wide range of applications and revenue streams in the coming year.

As well as reviewing the year, the report addresses emerging trends and business models in key vertical markets such as Retail, Aviation, Hospitality, Smart transportation, IoT,  healthcare and general industry. In addition, it charts the progress of technology trends and developments including standards evolution, OpenRoaming, Mesh Wi-Fi, and Mobile edge Computing. All these topics and more are covered in this year’s Report. We hope it provides a valuable guide to the varied and influential work the WBA carries out in the world of Wi-Fi and unlicensed spectrum technology; and inspires you to take part in the rich and business-critical agenda that lies ahead in 2021.

Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN® trials

Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN ^® Trials – An Overview of Use Cases Across Regions Combining Two Powerful Technologies, the latest joint white paper from the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) and LoRa Alliance, illustrates that selecting an intelligent multi-radio strategy is becoming increasingly important to succeed in a connected world. This paper provides details on practical trials and proof of concept deployments (POCs), representing a variety of use cases implemented across different geographies and verticals. It concludes that hybrid Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN connectivity increases market opportunities and provides a strong ROI while offering enhanced network solutions.

This paper builds on the two organizations’ earlier work, “Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Deployment Synergies: Expanding Addressable Use Cases for the Internet of Things,” which compared the two technologies theoretically and sought to demonstrate how they could be utilized to effectively support a vast array of use cases.

Wi-Fi 6 Trial Case Study – Education – Shenzhen university town