Aruba Helps Global Operators Seamlessly Extend 5G Cellular Networks to Enterprise Environments with Passpoint-Based Wi-Fi Services

Recently, Aruba, a subsidiary of HPE, announced the launch of a new roaming service designed to help cellular users switch to Aruba enterprise Wi-Fi networks securely and automatically. This new service, called "Aruba Air Pass", enables seamless switching between cellular and Wi-Fi networks while ensuring security and quality of service. Aruba Air Slice is a technology from Aruba to improve wireless performance. When the two are used together, operators can extend their 5G coverage into the enterprise and achieve seamless Wi-Fi calling and gigabit performance guarantees.

Evolving building codes, energy-efficient building materials, and low-emissivity glass have made it challenging for cellular signals to penetrate buildings, causing their performance to drop dramatically. In addressing this issue, Aruba customers can easily leverage their existing enterprise Wi-Fi infrastructure as a cost-effective alternative to microcells or distributed antenna systems (DAS) deployed indoors. Because 5G standards support both 3GPP and Wi-Fi radio access networks (RANs), international operators can leverage Wi-Fi as an indoor entry point for 5G services to deliver new enterprise-class services such as network slicing. This can help enterprise IT teams accelerate 5G adoption through an economical and seamless solution that greatly improves network performance and user experience within the enterprise.

A fundamental driving technology behind Aruba Air Pass is Passpoint, a standard created by the Wi-Fi Alliance that enables mobile devices to automatically authenticate on enterprise Wi-Fi networks with their cellular credentials. Because nearly all mobile devices support Passpoint, international operators can significantly expand their business with Aruba Air Pass, with nearly 20 billion square feet of area served by Aruba Air Pass infrastructure around the world becoming their potential business scope.

Delivering carrier-grade QoS and optimized user experience with Wi-Fi 6

Using the same OFDMA radio technology that is the core technology of 4G LTE and 5G NR base stations, Aruba Air Slice is a unique Wi-Fi 6 technology designed to provide carrier-grade quality assurance to optimize user and application experience. By dynamically allocating radio resources (such as time, frequency and spatial streams), Aruba Air Slice can provide guarantees for latency-sensitive applications (such as AR/VR, Zoom and Slack, mobile gaming and real-time IoT applications).

Using Aruba Air Pass and Aruba Air Slice, mobile network operators benefit from a globally scalable solution while maintaining continuous visibility and connectivity to their subscribers and working closely with Aruba’s global enterprise Wi-Fi customer base to deliver future 5G services.

“The combination of Aruba Air Pass and Aruba Air Slice gives operators the ability to extend the reach of their 5G networks into the enterprise while cost-effectively improving the experience for all end users,” said Jeff Lipton, vice president of strategy and corporate development at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “And, devices associated with the enterprise network using Aruba Air Pass can also access applications and services over Wi-Fi connections based on their roles and permissions, such as making and receiving calls and text messages.”