Re: Managing Mobile Connectivity

[Marcel Holtmann <marcel holtmann org>]

Hi Craig,

> I've been contemplating how one would deal with the variety of new
> wireless connection types and advertisement/discovery schemes that have
> been appearing recently.
> 
> We have zillions of wireless APs scattered around the world.  Many, if
> not most, smartphones allow for soft APs.  Wifi-P2P with its pre-
> association service discovery is here.  HotSpot 2.0 seems primed to
> become real soon and promises a new roaming experience.  DLS and TDLS
> are other kinds of connections that come to mind.  There are also lots
> of complications, such as lack of concurrency WRT wireless STAs.
> 
> I am wondering what would have to be done if a mobile device was brought
> into an environment where there was, for example, a legacy AP or two,
> HotSpot 2.0 AP, several phones running soft APs some with wireless
> isolation, some without, display devices, printers, phones advertising
> services over P2P, etc.  The list can go on and on.  It doesn't seem
> reasonable that mere mortal users can be expected to wade through the
> alphabet and logical soup that is the networking environment at, say,
> this local coffee shop.
> 
> It seems to me that there is a rather large missing piece to the
> wireless connectivity puzzle.  Over at "Linux Wireless" they call the
> P2P part of this the "connection manager or p2p control app".  This
> would integrate advertisement and discovery (mDNS) and provide a way for
> the system to manage wireless "connections" with minimal user
> interaction.  Hotspot 2.0 seems to begin to address part of the problem,
> but only the part that solves the 3G/4G data offload problem.
> 
> Do any of you folks know of anyone that is seriously working on this
> seemingly quite hard problem?

if you leave P2P out of this, then you already have these days WISPr 1.0
which works with all major hotspots. And it works nicely and is
supported by at least iPass and Boingo.

WISPr 2.0 (with EAP over HTTPS) is kinda stalled right now. Which is a
shame since that would have taken care of seamless 2G/3G data offload.
None of the hotspot providers are actively deploying WISPr 2.0.

Regards

Marcel