Enea brings a wealth of software and expertise, spanning both the 3GPP ecosystem and Carrier Wi-Fi. Our goal is to enhance the Wi-Fi offloading solution to improve on QoE-based decisions to always ensure that the user device selects the best available network across cellular and Wi-Fi networks, all while keeping the mobile operator firmly in control. While it’s still early in the process, we’re eager to share our ideas and would love to hear your feedback. Feel free to reach out to us through this form.

We believe the market needs a pragmatic solution. Here are some problems we aim to solve:

• Short-term goal: Maintain UE (device) connectivity to the cellular network as long as it provides good performance, even when a preferred Wi-Fi offloading network is available.
• Long-term goal: Ensure that a device always connects to the best-performing network—whether cellular or Wi-Fi—at any given moment.

In our companion white paper, Wi-Fi offloading – Why?, we suggest that mobile operators adopt selective offloading by deploying Wi-Fi only where it’s needed for indoor coverage and additional capacity. Now, taking this a step further, we propose making Wi-Fi offloading dynamic through a more intelligent network selection.

Phase 1: Intelligent Selective Offloading (“mobile-first offloading”)

As discussed in the The Device is King insights post, the decision of connecting to a Wi-Fi network is in the hands of the device. A prerequisite for Intelligent Selective Offloading is to find a way to occasionally prevent the device from connecting without affecting its willingness to do so the next time. We have found a way to achieve this.

A first ambition is to prevent the device from automatically connecting to the MNO controlled Wi-Fi network if the quality and performance of the cellular session is already considered to be good. This means offloading will only occur when it clearly benefits the user, optimizing the overall network performance and maintaining a high quality of experience (QoE).

Phase 2: Real-Time Dual-Network Quality Assessment

As a next step, we also aim to incorporate real-time quality data from the Wi-Fi network, allowing us to dynamically evaluate both cellular and Wi-Fi network performance. Using frequent Change of Authorization (CoA) requests, we can ensure that users are always connected to the network offering the best experience. Ideally, the Wi-Fi quality information would be provided during the authorization process and continuosly updated throughout the session.

Many Wi-Fi equipment vendors support signaling connection-related information using the RADIUS Connect-Info attribute (#77) defined in RFC2869. Some vendors have also extended this approach to include information about the Received Signal Strength Indication and Wi-Fi Channel Numbers. A challenge is that vendors have defined their own syntax for encoding the attribute’s quality information. There is ongoing work within the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) to formalize the syntax for encoding the Wi-Fi quality information. If this is broadly implemented by Wi-Fi vendors, it will pave the way for a fully standardized way of providing Wi-Fi quality information to Wi-Fi service management systems such as the Enea Aptilo SMP. We are also able to extract performance KPI data via proprietary Wi-Fi vendor APIs if available.own