Residential Hotspots Key to Providing Internet to Macro-Urban Environments

Residential hotspots efficiently provide Internet access for the public in macro-urban environments, but it's challenging to keep this connection secure over unknown untrusted home networks. After all, private home users are unable to inspect the public traffic going over their local network.

In his keynote today at Broadband World Forum, Guy Ray, director of strategy and technology in the Connected Home Division at Intel, described how cloudification of WiFi access points can be used to enable secure Internet access for community WiFi users rather than anonymous, untrusted residential home spots.

He began by looking at how expectations of home broadband have changed in the last ten years. Today, people prefer access points that provide good coverage in every room of a house as opposed to high speeds near the access point.

"Home WiFi is evolving with distributed architectures of multi-room access points," he said.

With multi-room access points, however, it can be a challenge to provide secure service. Currently, around 100 million home access points allow any user with the same service provider to access the Internet, said Ray.

"We are working on a WiFi architecture that will provide secure access for a variety of devices, using the cloud. With Cloud WPA it is now possible to provide secure access for users over any network," he told the audience. "The Cloud WPA architecture can deliver secure, end-to-end community access over any home networks, both legacy and modern."

He pointed out that several analysts are already looking at WiFi architecture for 5G, for example Deloitte, for example, said in a recent report: "5G capacity will rely on greater densification. Carriers will deploy many more cells, homespots and hotspots with a coverage measured in meters."

Ray concluded his keynote with some of the opportunities this provides: "The potential for service providers is enormous -- from cost-effective 5G and smart cities to new revenue models and services."

Related posts:

• How to Take an Entrepreneurial Approach in an Age of Disruption
• 5G is the 'Next Big Transformation in the Network'
• Qnbn opts for Passive Dark Fiber Network Infrastructure Across Qatar

— Gabriella Jenkins, Digital Content Marketer at KNect365, based in London. In addition to contributing to UBB2020, she is the editor of the 5G + Virtualisation community which supports the 5G World event series and works on the team behind London Tech Week/a>.