WBA survey: roaming a key strategy for businesses

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has stated that 79 per cent of service providers, equipment manufacturers and enterprises have adopted its OpenRoaming standard as part of their business planning.

The claim was made following a cross-industry survey of the aforementioned organisations, carried out by the organisation. The standard was introduced in May of this year.

Other statistics quoted in the survey include 45 per cent of organisations identifying roaming as a key “monetisation strategy,” while 57 per cent believe that multi-access edge computing will lead to new Wi-Fi use cases.

A spokesperson for the organisation said: “The vision for WBA OpenRoaming is that the world will become a single, giant Wi-Fi network. This will allow billions of devices to connect automatically and securely to millions of Wi-Fi networks around the world.

“Users will be able to roam from location to location without the need for logins, registrations or passwords. High-profile backers of WBA OpenRoaming include AT&T, Boingo, Broadcom, Cisco, Commscope, Google, Intel and Samsung.”

WBA CEO, Tiago Rodrigues, said: “There was a time, not so long ago, that when we discussed the potential for Wi-Fi roaming or the convergence of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G, we were met with blank stares. Now, it’s the complete opposite. [These statistics] reinforce the role of Wi-Fi during the pandemic to keep everyone connected.”