Comcast and Liberty Global, the world’s two largest cable operators, have forged a Wi-Fi agreement that lets their respective subscribers use each other’s Wi-Fi access points both here and abroad.
The landmark international roaming partnership between the two companies will go to trial later this year before launching across millions of Wi-Fi access points next year.
Comcast has a stated goal of 8 million Xfinity WiFi access points live across its footprint by the end of this year while Liberty Global has more than 2.5 million hotspots deployed across the Netherlands, Ireland, Poland and Switzerland under the Wi-Fi Free and WiFiSpots SSIDs.
“This is our first step in bringing global Wi-Fi connectivity to our customers,” said Tom Nagel, senior vice president of strategic initiatives for Comcast Cable. “We are excited to be working with Liberty Global and see this partnership as a great opportunity to further expand our Wi-Fi footprint and offer fast and secure wireless broadband service to our customers, not only while they are here in the United States, but also while they are traveling overseas.”
The bilateral agreement gives many of the 11 million Americans visiting Europe and the 12 million Europeans visiting the United States each year a cost saving alternative to cellular data roaming when traveling abroad.
“We are delighted to join forces with Comcast to begin building worldwide Wi-Fi connectivity and we hope that this will create interest from other cable operators to join us,” said Balan Nair, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Liberty Global. “We are offering Wi-Fi service in a growing number of countries across Europe and are excited to be able to offer our European customers a valuable and innovative new service in the United States on Xfinity WiFi.”
In order to enable access to each other’s hotspots, Liberty and Comcast will need to have RADIUS authentication integration in place on the backend in order for Comcast’s RADIUS servers see Liberty Global’s RADIUS servers, and vice versa.
“Obviously, we have an ocean separating us, so we have to connect our servers to each other,” Nagel said. “That’s the thing that makes it go. There are a couple of different ways to do that. One is we can direct connect by leasing a circuit to each other, connect and pass those information packets back and forth.
“Another way to do this is you could integrate with a hub. These are companies that we have a few relationships with and they do as well. We use companies like iPass, BSG, and Syniverse. So you can go to those companies and connect to those hubs. If both of you connect to a hub then it’s the hub’s responsibility to connect you and pass those packets back and forth. One of the things we’re working on right now is which one of those methods do we want to do? I think we’re very close to making a decision, but we haven’t made one yet. It’s not a big decision, it’s just more one of just timing and logistics.”
Earlier this year, Comcast started a trial with Japan’s KDDI and Taiwan Mobile that allowed their subscribers to access Comcast’s Wi-Fi hotspots when they’re in the United States. Nagel said that was a business model Wi-Fi agreement instead of the bilateral agreement that Comcast and Liberty announced this morning. The trial with the Asian cellular companies uses hubs from iPass and other companies.
Nagel said while Comcast and Liberty Global “were very engaged” in the development of Hotspot 2.0/Passpoint, it wasn’t a part of the current roaming agreement.
Hotspot 2.0 allows mobile devices to automatically join a Wi-Fi network based upon preferences and network optimization whenever the user enters a Hotspot 2.0-enabled area. Hotspot is the technical specification that the WiFi Alliance uses for hardware while Passpoint is the certification process to that is needed to make sure the hardware is Hotspot 2.0 compliant. Hotspot 2.0 brings cellular like capabilities to Wi-Fi users by enabling them to log in one time instead of entering their passwords at every access point when they come in range.
“Passpoint is clearly on our roadmap,” Nagel said. “It’s not essential for us to get this up and running. We both believe in Passpoint, it’s on our roadmap, but it’s not going to be at launch. Our goal is to have this up and running by the end of the year. We’re still on the path for that.”
