Aruba has announced a new offering, called Air Pass, that bridges 5G cellular networks with in-building WLANs to enable seamless hand-off between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 networks. Aruba also announced Air Slice, a new feature of its Wi-Fi 6 APs, that lets administrators reserve radio resources for specific applications.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Aruba Air Pass lets enterprises and cooperating carriers provide a seamless hand-off from a 5G network to the WLAN for voice and data.
The goal is provide a more seamless user experience and maintain a high quality of service. Indoor service quality for cellular networks will be an issue for 5G because the frequencies used don’t propagate well through walls or physical barriers.
While solutions such as small cells or mobile antennas are available, they’re expensive and cumbersome to deploy. Instead, organizations can simply use their wireless network to serve as a bridge.
Hand It Over
To enable the transfer from cellular to Wi-Fi, Aruba’s Air Pass relies on a standard called Passpoint. Developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance, Passpoint automates authentication between the carrier/service provider and the wireless network.
That means there’s no need for the user to choose a network, sign in with credentials, or go through a portal. Users can make voice calls, send texts, and get data access automatically.
For more on Passpoint and how it works with Aruba, check out this 20-minute Tech Field Day video.
If you’re uncomfortable with the notion of allowing mobile clients onto your wireless network automatically, Aruba is happy to direct you to its ClearPass network access product. Using ClearPass, you can ensure that Air Pass devices are shunted to a guest VLAN that limits access to the corporate network. Note that Air Pass requires the use of Aruba Central, the comapny’s cloud-based management tool, though ClearPass is optional.
Aruba is establishing partnerships with carriers and service providers to ensure support for Air Pass and to cooperate on authentication. Aruba says it will handle backend agreements on behalf of customers—all the customers need to do is operate Air Pass from Aruba Central.
However, for Air Pass to be broadly useful, Aruba will have to secure partnerships with all the major carriers. As of this announcement, Aruba has not officially announced any partnerships.
Slicing And Dicing
Aruba also announced a new feature for its Wi-Fi 6/802.11ax APs called Air Slice. Air Slice lets administrators reserve radio resources for specific applications, such as real-time apps, to ensure service levels. Air Slice uses the DPI engine and policy enforcement capabilities that are built into each AP to identify the application and then apply the service policy to the radio.
Administrators can set service levels around bit rates, latency, and jitter. To ensure that AP radio capacity isn’t wasted, applications that are out of policy can use reserved resources if no in-policy apps happen to be passing through the AP at the time.
Aruba says Air Slice policies can be maintained across APs as a user or device roams from one AP to another. As with Air Pass, the Air Slice service is configured and managed from Aruba Central. Air Slice is only available on Aruba’s Wi-Fi 6 APs. Air Slice can be used independently of Air Pass, or in conjunction.
