According to a Wireless Broadband Alliance cross-industry survey of service providers, equipment manufacturers and enterprises, almost four out of five (79 percent) have adopted or plan to adopt the WBA OpenRoaming standard. As the Wi-Fi roaming standard was only introduced in late May 2020, this demonstrates a very rapid and widespread acceptance of WBA OpenRoaming in less than six months. 

The vision for WBA OpenRoaming is that the world will become a single, giant Wi-Fi network, allowing billions of people and their 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.

This survey finding is one of many insights explained in the the Annual Industry Report from the Wireless Broadband Association – the worldwide industry body dedicated to improving Wi-Fi standards and services. The report, which is available to download here also highlights the following findings:

•    95 percent of the comms industry say that Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E will be important to their business, with 65 percent saying they have deployed or will deploy Wi-Fi 6/6E before the end of 2021

•    67 percent said that the convergence of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G would be very important or critical to their future business plans

•    Roaming is the number one monetization strategy for 2021 with 45 percent placing it in their top three choices, followed by offload (38 percent) and analytics (32 percent)

•    57 percent believe that multi-access edge computing (MEC) will lead to new use cases for Wi-Fi in the future

•    Smart cities represents the primary vertical use case being targeted by the comms industry in relation to Wi-Fi, with 56 percent saying that it is one of their top targets. This is followed by retail (39 percent) and education or campus networks (39 percent)

“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,” said Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of Wireless Broadband Alliance. “Now, it’s the complete opposite. Across the comms industry, we’re seeing excitement building around these trends. 2020 has been a difficult year for everyone and this reinforces the role of Wi-Fi during the pandemic to keep everyone connected.”

Speaking about the comms industry’s response to COVID-19, which is also analyzed in the report, Rodrigues continued, “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.”