Making Your Wi-Fi Free to Roam

Most people take roaming agreements between cellular operators for granted, if they even think of them at all. These agreements — which allow consumers to wander in and out of a cellular coverage area without losing their calls — are set up between the major carriers for voice and even for data, but they may soon encompass Wi-Fi.

According to a Cisco product manager, operators are becoming more interested in Wi-Fi roaming, which could enable consumers to hop onto more Wi-Fi networks and may even make such hopping seamless. The rationale for Wi-Fi roaming is simple. Carriers need it to deliver a good customer experience. The demand for mobile data will far exceed the capacity of cellular networks according to most sources, so having a decent alternative network that can handle data makes sense. Cisco, for example, predicts that mobile data will grow 26-fold in the next four years. Much of that growth will come from video, which is more challenging to stream over networks, since it depends on a continuous connection of bits that are assembled in real time to make up the content, as opposed to a single download that can be reassembled later.