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21 November 2022 – The prpl Foundation, an open-source community dedicated to carrier-grade software for broadband consumer premise equipment has announced that CableLabs has joined the foundation to collaborate on the implementation of Mobile Wi-Fi technology to provide seamless Wi-Fi connectivity for mobile devices.

The collaboration brings CableLabs’ Mobile Wi-Fi technology one step closer to full adoption as an open-source implementation in the prplMesh Wi-Fi software stack. The prplMesh software stack is a compliant open-source implementation of the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi CERTIFIED EasyMesh open industry standard protocol for Wi-Fi mesh networks.

Wi-Fi users often encounter poor performance when their smartphones and other mobile devices connect to a suboptimal Wi-Fi access point when better access points are available. As a result, users experience poor connections and often abandon their Wi-Fi connection in favor of their cellular service.

To address this problem, CableLabs has developed Mobile Wi-Fi, which manages a collection of Wi-Fi access points that allows the roaming of a mobile device to the best access point available. The result is a collection of otherwise independent access points acting as a single contiguous network, much like a cellular network, with devices being handed off seamlessly from one access point to another.

“With the latest Mobile Wi-Fi technology, there is no longer a need for a mobile device to form a new Wi-Fi connection when it moves from one access point to another,” says Steve Arendt of CableLabs. “Instead, a device will keep the same Wi-Fi connection to its own virtual network, which will follow the user as they move about a house, street or neighborhood.”

For more information about how Mobile Wi-Fi achieves this connectivity, read the CableLabs blog post, “CableLabs Brings Mobile Wi-Fi’s Power to Wi-Fi Industry for a Better User Experience.”

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