Aruba Air Pass launched to improve enterprise connectivity worldwide
Aruba has launched Aruba Air Pass, a new roaming service designed to enable global telecommunications companies to extend their 5G cellular coverage and securely and automatically roam onto Aruba enterprise WiFi networks.
The roaming service, combined with Aruba Air Slice radio resource management, is designed to offer secure mobility between cellular and enterprise networks with carrier-grade Quality of Service.
A key technology fuelling Aruba Air Pass is Passpoint, a standard created by the Wi-Fi Alliance to enable mobile devices to automatically authenticate on enterprise Wi-Fi networks using their cellular credentials.
Passpoint is a broadly accepted standard, and is supported on nearly all mobile devices, Aruba states.
By leveraging Aruba Air Pass, global telcos can expand their coverage to potentially include the nearly 20 billion square feet served by Aruba Air Pass-ready infrastructure worldwide, according to the company.
Aruba Air Slice is a WiFi 6 technology designed to optimise user and application experience by providing carrier-grade quality and assurance. The technology is based on the same OFDMA radio technology that powers 4G LTE and 5G NR radios.
It dynamically allocates radio resources, such as time, frequency and spatial streams, therefore guaranteeing performance for latency-sensitive applications such as AR/VR, Zoom and Slack, mobile gaming and real-time IoT applications, Aruba states.
By dynamically allocating radio resources, such as time, frequency and spatial streams, Aruba Air Slice guarantees performance for latency-sensitive applications such as AR/VR, Zoom and Slack, mobile gaming and real-time IoT applications.
Aruba states that the launch is a response for growing demand for high quality connectivity.
According to Aruba, due to evolving building codes, energy efficient construction materials and low-emission glass, cellular signals are challenged when penetrating buildings, resulting in diminished performance.
With Aruba Air Pass, customers can leverage their existing enterprise WiFi infrastructure as an alternative to deploying indoor small cells or distributed antenna systems (DAS).
Because 5G standards support aggregation of both 3GPP and Wi-Fi radio access networks (RANs), global telcos can leverage WiFi as an indoor onramp to 5G services to deliver new classes of enterprise services, such as network slicing, Aruba states.
According to the company, this helps enterprise IT teams accelerate their adoption of 5G with an economical solution that improves performance and user experience inside the enterprise.
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, vice president of strategy and corporate development Jeff Lipton says, "The combination of Aruba Air Pass with Aruba Air Slice gives telcos the ability to extend the reach of their 5G networks into the enterprise while economically improving the overall end user experience.
"Devices that associate with an enterprise network using Aruba Air Pass may then use their Wi-Fi connections to access applications and services, such as making and receiving calls and text messages, based on their roles and permissions.
