Future Galaxy smartphones could make fiddling with Wi-Fi credentials and manual logins a thing of the past after Samsung jumped at the opportunity to join the WBA OpenRoaming initiative. Much like its name implies, this is a brainchild of the Wireless Broadband Alliance, one of today's most powerful telecom consortiums dedicated to wireless interoperability and harnessing the full power of Wi-Fi. As its most ambitious effort to date, the OpenRoaming project envisions a future wherein smartphones, notebooks, wearables, and other consumer electronics are capable of dynamically jumping across public hotspots in real time, eliminating a significant degree of user annoyance traditionally associated with Wi-Fi logins.
Samsung is hardly alone in believing Wi-Fi still has a lot to offer even today, at the advent of the 5G era. More specifically, the likes of Google, Intel, and even cellular experts at Boingo have already officially joined the project.
The road to 5G goes through Wi-Fi 6
In its simplest form, OpenRoaming is essentially an alternative to cellular communications, including the incoming 5G wave. While it may appear to be more limited than conventional mobile networks, it doesn't fare too badly when compared to mmWave 5G, i.e. the “real” fifth generation of telecom tech. What has so far been identified as the only viable road to next-gen communications is already notorious for its extreme co-dependency on densely populated networks of small-cell base stations. Meaning 5G's availability is currently in a rather sad place.
Teaching Wi-Fi some new tricks could help smoothen this transitional period in which the world will inevitably be stuck “between Gs,” so to speak. That's precisely where a large portion of OpenRoaming's potential resides. Naturally, the solution's creators are also hoping this strategy could open up new ad-focused monetization opportunities moving forward. Coupled with the rise of Wi-Fi 6, it appears short-distance wireless tech is about to experience a miniature renaissance of sorts, especially if the WBA is even somewhat successful in its plans to leverage OpenRoaming in order to bridge the LTE-5G gap in a maximally seamless manner – for smartphone users, naturally.
