FRAMINGHAM, Mass. – 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.

CableLabs
prpl Foundation