World Wi-Fi Day
The program recognises and celebrates the significant role Wi-Fi plays in cities and communities around the world by driving exciting and innovative projects to connect the unconnected. It’s a worldwide initiative organised by Wireless Broadband Alliance under the leadership of Connected City Advisory Board (CCAB).
Under the umbrella of World Wi-Fi Day, the Wireless Broadband Alliance also announced its City Wi-Fi Roaming Project, allowing consumers to automatically roam, throughout August and September 2016, between public Wi-Fi networks of major cities including New York City, San Francisco, San Jose and Singapore. Involving 20 operators, the cities temporarily set up city Wi-Fi roaming services, giving residents, workers and visiting customers from other mobile carriers, free, automatic internet access once they’ve downloaded the Passpoint profile provided by GlobalReach Technology.
The drive increased the number of consumers using Passpoint, by giving them automatic, secure and seamless roaming across over 1,000 city hotspots. These included 200 LinkNYC kiosks in New York, 228 in downtown San Francisco, 500 across San Jose and San Jose airport and 290 at MRT stations and Sentosa Island Singapore.
The GlobalReach Platform Enables Project.
The City Wi-Fi Roaming Project was supported by the GlobalReach Technology captive portal and Wi-Fi AAA / Passpoint OSU solutions platform. Through a simple one-time registration, users downloaded the Passpoint profile for seamless roaming whenever they were in reach of any of the city hotspots, plus next-generation hotspots launching in the future.
The GlobalReach OSU uses the power of the GlobalReach virtual RADIUS environment. This makes it possible to proxy RADIUS from multiple customers securely from across the globe, using the localised RADIUS clusters virtualised in the cloud. Using a few clicks to configure virtual RADIUS servers, roaming agreements can be put into place for service providers. This enables automatic and secure customer roaming, for users who’ve downloaded the profile.
The GlobalReach captive portal and AAA RADIUS platform for service providers features a built-in Passpoint OSU as standard. The platform is already used to support some of the largest city Wi-Fi networks including LinkNYC, San Francisco and San Jose. It can support more than a billion authentications a month, across any mobile platform.
Key Highlights
- City Wi-Fi Roaming Project involved four international cities and more than 1,000 hotspots
- User access via a free, one-time Passpoint profile download
- 20 international operators took part in cities including New York City, San Francisco, San Jose and Singapore