The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) today announced that the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre has upgraded its Wi-Fi 6 network to support WBA’s OpenRoaming.
Introduced in May 2020, the OpenRoaming standard unites a broad range of Wi-Fi providers into a single cloud-based federation, allowing users to hop between member networks without having to register or sign-in each time.
At the RAI convention center, OpenRoaming will make it easier for exhibitors and attendees to access Wi-Fi by only having to log in once. The WBA list of members is exhaustive, including many big-name providers, both wired and wireless among the members.
WBA says that its OpenRoaming standard is now available at over 1 million hotspots worldwide, spanning a variety of venues, including airports, universities, stadiums, office buildings and municipalities.
Examples include San Jose State University, Fira Barcelona Gran Via, Canary Wharf, London Stadium, Live Nation BottleRock Festival, Brazil’s São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport and various European municipalities and tourist destinations enabled by Boingo, Cisco, CommScope, Extreme Networks and other members of the federation.
Cisco has led the Wi-Fi upgrades at the RAI convention center.
In 2021, the RAI deployed a Cisco Wireless Wi-Fi 6 network at the center. Wi-Fi 6 is the newest generation of Wi-Fi technology. Less than two years later, at the Wireless Global Congress EMEA event held at the RAI, the WBA federation members partnered with Cisco to deliver an OpenRoaming trial. Federation members delivering the OpenRoaming experience included: Agreefy, AT&T, Boingo, Charter, Cisco, CityRoam, Cloud4Wi, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, GlobalReach, Google, Intel, Marriott, MiniMe Labs, SingleDigits and WeFi.
Throughout the four-day event, over 1,139 unique users collectively consumed more than a terabyte of data, highlighting Wi-Fi 6’s ability to provide high speeds to multiple users simultaneously.
Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of WBA, said: “Nearly 10,000 convention centers, arenas and stadiums worldwide have deployed Wi-Fi throughout their venues because it’s the preferred way that people stay connected during trade shows and conferences. The RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre is on the leading edge of this trend, first with Wi-Fi 6 and now with OpenRoaming.”
Bret Baas, manager of IT at RAI Amsterdam, said in the near future the convention center plans to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E, which uses devices especially designed for the 6 GHz spectrum.