The news breaks two years to the month since the OpenRoaming platform launched.
It was developed as a global solution based on a common set of standards to bridge the gap between cellular and Wifi, offering users frictionless connectivity as users roam between guest Wifi networks and public Wifi hotspots, as well as from cellular to Wi-Fi.
Confirming the one million milestone, the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) said the hotspots span "a wide variety of venues", including San Jose State University, Fira Barcelona Gran Via, Canary Wharf, London Stadium, Live Nation BottleRock Festival, Brazil’s São Paulo International Airport and various European municipalities and tourist destinations enabled by Boingo, Cisco, CommScope, Extreme Networks and other members of the federation.
Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of the WBA, said the pace of growth "reflects demand driven by the emergence of private 5G networks requiring simple roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi".
He added: “This milestone is just the beginning. We expect to see even more types of locations adopt WBA OpenRoaming, including hotels, cafés, trains, planes and connected cars. In fact, in our most recent cross-industry survey, 40% of businesses said they have implemented Passpoint/OpenRoaming or plan to do so before the end of this year. Wherever you work, live and play, OpenRoaming will be there.”
OpenRoaming has been adopted by most major Wi-Fi equipment vendors and device OEMs. Federation members include Adentro, Airties, Boingo, Broadcom, Cisco, Cityroam, Cloud4WI, Commscope, eduroam, Enea, Extreme Networks, GlobalReach, Intel, Kyrio, Samsung, Single Digits, and many others amongst the growing eco-system.
Release 3 includes a "significant improvement" on the legal and commercial framework, according to WBA, which provides the ability to implement a new templated approach, making commercial arrangements between federation members simpler and easy to scale. Dynamic settlement capabilities make it possible for rate variations to be varied at peak times.
In addition, Release 3 includes automated tools, reporting and APIs to significantly reduce the overhead for management and administration of an OpenRoaming network, while providing an online portal for federation members to self-serve. Enhanced Identity Proofing has also been enabled so that identity providers are able to meet regulatory and legislative requirements as well as corporate and business needs.
