In today’s world, wherever consumers are, they ‘just’ want to get connected to networks quickly and easily. We are spoilt with the diversity of networks that we can join across mobile networks and public Wi-Fi, but as we’ve all experienced, getting connected quickly can be challenging, in particular to Public-Guest Wi-Fi. Venues of course want to engage with their public visitors, but whether it is the Asian Games, a team sporting event, shopping centre, or K-pop concert at one of the 80,000+ capacity stadiums South Asia has to offer, it can be a challenging experience for venue and visitors alike to create a user experience that works securely for all.
Connecting visitors to a public space, venue or event, is a key part of an event or brand experience. For the visitor it is fundamental – they want to be connected quickly and efficiently while knowing that their connection is secure and not open to having their identity compromised or data, such as payment card details, stolen. In the past, this has not been easy, because public Wi-Fi is characterized by a larger number of transitory individual users connecting to the same hotspot – how do you make it easy and secure when you don’t know your users until they want to connect?
For brands, venues and network owners, secure public Wi-Fi is an integral part of the brand experience, allowing them to share information, or special features to enhance an experience, as well as fulfil regulatory requirements they may have. It also provides valuable analytics and engagement tools that are essential for building and enhancing the customer relationship. But achieving this requires them to know who is connecting.
In the majority of cases today, venues can engage with their guests during the signup process via a captive portal – but these solutions do not address the visitors desire to ‘just connect’ and can be complex to run. First you need to know which SSID to connect with and then go through a Captive Portal, normally taking several minutes to complete. Traffic may be free, sponsored or charged for, with throttled speeds or user data collected to sell to other parties. This poor experience often leads to users choosing to rely on a cellular network, if available, losing the venue a valuable opportunity to engage and improve their venue experience. These challenges and recent issues surrounding the implementation of MAC randomization by the major device operating systems, such as iOS, Android and Windows are headaches that are easily addressed with the introduction of OpenRoaming. It ensures an automatic connection with security and privacy for Wi-Fi in public space and venue visitors, while still enabling the same engagement and analytics options available today to network operators and venues.
OpenRoaming is an industry standard which creates the framework to connect billions of users and things to millions of Wi-Fi networks globally. It is an open connectivity framework for all organizations in the wireless ecosystem to power new opportunities in the 5G era.
Unlike captive portals, once a device has been successfully onboarded to an OpenRoaming compliant network, the connection is fully secure and future connections will be automatic, while still retaining the ability for venues and network owners to engage with visitors, via notification pop-ups to the device. Those visitors also retain their privacy and the ability to instantly connect to any future OpenRoaming network they come into contact with.
With user engagement high on the list of priorities for venue owners, network operators and users alike, developing a strong business case for public Wi-Fi, including how to improve user engagement with the use of OpenRoaming technology over legacy captive portal Wi-Fi is critical. The improved user engagement offered through these technologies can bring about significant business benefits including:
By understanding and addressing the requirements of both venues and their visitors, businesses can enhance the overall user experience, reduce costs, and unlock new revenue opportunities.
