The April 16, 2026 Enterprise Connectivity Forum, hosted by the Wireless Broadband Alliance,provided a useful update on the federation progress and some interesting case studies.
The Numbers That Reframe the Conversation
The session opened with data that changes how this market should be discussed. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government network grew its OpenRoaming traffic volume by a factor of 100 between October 2023 and July 2025. AT&T, after turning on Passpoint across its footprint, reported a sevenfold increase in both sessions and gigabytes delivered over Wi-Fi. At Fira Barcelona's Smart City Expo World Congress, roughly 11,000 attendees connected via OpenRoaming, representing 52 percent of the audience, and the venue reported 20 to 22 percent more devices attaching to the network compared with the prior year's captive portal experience.
Why the Numbers Matter
What makes the data meaningful is that it closes the loop between technology and commercial outcomes. Removing the human from the authentication flow changes the economics of guest Wi-Fi. More devices attach, attach for longer, and attach more reliably. Analytics improve because more of the audience is visible. Roaming flows open up. The business case has now a set of anchor data points the industry can defend in a boardroom.
The Value Exchange Deadlock
The harder question is the one the data cannot yet fully answer. Call it the value exchange deadlock. A retail brand, a hotel group, or a municipality looking at OpenRoaming asks a simple question. If I open my network to third party identities, what do I get in return? Identity providers ask the mirror image question. If I push Passpoint profiles to my users, how many venues will they actually benefit from? The framework is solid. but the business dynamics are still being worked out, vertical by vertical.
Sub-Federations: The Next Organizing Principle
The most useful intellectual contribution of the session was the concept of sub-federations. Rather than treating OpenRoaming as a single monolithic market, the ecosystem is beginning to organize into domain-specific federations with their own value exchange rules. Hotels and booking apps. Airports and airlines. Transit authorities and urban mobility apps. Shopping malls and retail apps. Cities and municipal apps. Each of these pairings has a coherent commercial logic, a natural user flow, and a set of data exchange scenarios that make both the network owner and the identity provider demonstrably better off. The grocery chain Ahold Delhaize in Belgium, cited as a reference deployment, is an early proof point. The next two years will likely produce dozens more.
The Intelligence Gap
This is where the market gets interesting for analysts, and where the lack of independent, structured intelligence becomes a problem. Anyone trying to size the opportunity, benchmark vendors, or pick a vertical to enter is currently working from a mix of WBA publications, vendor marketing, and conference anecdotes. That is not a foundation for a capital allocation decision, a partnership strategy, or a product roadmap.
Introducing the Maravedis OpenRoaming Market Tracker
This is precisely why Maravedis has launched the OpenRoaming Market Tracker, our new annual intelligence report covering the global OpenRoaming ecosystem. The report will synthesize 12 months of deployment activity, ecosystem movement, technology standards work, and business model evolution into a single authoritative reference. Pre-orders are open now at a 10 percent discount off the public release price.
What Is Inside
Chapter 1 establishes federation scale, ANP versus IDP balance, and the proprietary Maravedis OpenRoaming Market Maturity Index.
Chapter 2 maps the full vendor landscape across identity providers, access network providers, infrastructure, software, and systems integrators, with 25 to 30 independent company profiles and the Maravedis Vendor Positioning Matrix.
Chapter 3 delivers ten vertical deep dives covering hospitality, retail, MDU, airports, stadia, smart cities, education, healthcare, enterprise campus, and automotive and in-flight. These are the sub-federations outlined above, analyzed with deployment data, business model viability, and a five-year outlook to 2031.
Chapter 4 provides regional intelligence across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa.
Chapter 5 tracks WBA Releases 1 through 5, Passpoint device readiness, MAC randomization resolution, Wi-Fi 7 economics, and the emerging integration with 3GPP.
Chapters 6 and 7 address monetization models and deliver quantitative forecasts through 2031.
Chapter 8 presents six to eight original case studies, an annual scorecard, and a strategic outlook.
Who It Is For
For vendors, the Tracker provides the competitive context needed to refine positioning. For operators and MSPs, it answers the question of where to allocate effort next. For enterprises, it de-risks the decision to commit to an OpenRoaming deployment. For investors, it offers a neutral read on a federation that is quietly becoming essential wireless infrastructure.
The Bottom Line
The webinar confirmed that OpenRoaming has left the proof of concept era. The next question is how fast the commercial models catch up. That is the story we will be tracking, every year.