iPass Mobile Network
Unmatched global access
The iPass Mobile Network is the world’s largest commercial Wi-Fi network and trusted connectivity platform, with far more hotels, airports, business venues and inflight Internet than any other network. The iPass Mobile Network has over 1.2 million hotspots in 123 countries and territories1 as follows:
| Summary by World Region |
Wi-Fi Hotspots |
| Europe |
366,412 |
| Asia |
786,902 |
| North America |
35,404 |
| Central / South America & Caribbean |
3,297 |
| Australia & Oceania |
1,608 |
| Middle East & Africa |
8,768 |
| Open Access (Free Wi-Fi) |
61,303 |
1 As per the ‘ISO 3166’ list of 249 country codes.
You get your network in your pocket virtually anywhere you roam.
The iPass Mobile Network is the world’s largest commercial Wi-Fi network and trusted connectivity platform. For enterprise customers, it provides aggregated access to hundreds of different networks using a single login based on the user’s existing corporate credentials. The iPass Mobile Network provides organizations with:
- Single secure login: Mobile users can use their corporate credentials to easily and securely log in to the Internet across the world’s largest commercial access footprint. The organization receives a single invoice that details usage records by user and connection method.
- Single vendor relationship: IT gets the simplicity of dealing with a single vendor rather than having to sign contracts with, monitor and manage possibly hundreds of service providers, giving you predictable and standardized rates around the world. Additionally, iPass can serve as a single point of trust-organizations don’t have to worry whether they can trust the security of each and every provider within the iPass Mobile Network.
- Secure authentication: When users log in to the iPass Mobile Network, their credentials are passed over the Internet using a 128-bit encrypted connection that uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol and mutual key exchange between the various iPass platform components. The iPass protocol ensures that users’ credentials (username and password) and other possible authentication attributes are not compromised.
- Reliability / high availability: The iPass Mobile Network includes four globally distributed data centers to reduce authentication latency, and is built to support a hub and spoke authentication architecture, redundantly engineered to provide carrier-grade 99.999 percent availability.
iPass Services Fabric
For enterprise customers, the iPass Services Fabric is a key component of the iPass Mobile Network. It enables users to easily authenticate to any of the networks within the iPass Mobile Network by using a single set of credentials (which can be their corporate domain credentials).
When a user connects to any of the service providers in the iPass Mobile Network, the user credentials are routed from the service provider across the iPass Services Fabric to the entity responsible for that user (typically the enterprise). There, the credentials are validated (e.g., using the enterprise directory). Once validated, the iPass Services Fabric informs the service provider to grant Internet access to the end user. This scalable fabric allows iPass to add new service providers to the iPass Mobile Network without configuration changes at the enterprise. Similarly, when a new enterprise chooses to use the iPass Mobile Network, the service providers that are part of the iPass Mobile Network need no configuration changes. The iPass Services Fabric provides a globally distributed, fault-tolerant, highly available core that ensures that the iPass Mobile Network can grow and adapt without disruption to the providers and users of the network.
The iPass Services Fabric includes the following components:
- iPass Network Gateway: The iPass Network Gateway is an application that is deployed at each network provider’s facilities. The iPass Network Gateway receives end-user authentication requests for Internet connectivity from the local network provider, and securely forwards these requests to one of the globally distributed iPass Transaction Centers across an encrypted connection using the SSL protocol.
- iPass Transaction Centers: The iPass Transaction Centers validate the local network provider that is sending the request on behalf of the end user, and securely forward this request to an iPass Services Gateway residing at the enterprise. The iPass Transaction Center also receives the enterprise authorization passed on by the iPass Services Gateway, and routes it back to the appropriate iPass Network Gateway. iPass has multiple transaction centers that act as a globally distributed and fully redundant network. The services gateways can use any iPass Transaction Center to complete the authorization request. The robust iPass transaction-processing fabric is designed to deliver real-world service availability levels exceeding 99.99%.
- iPass Services Gateway: The iPass Services Gateway is an application deployed on the network of enterprise customers (iPass RoamServer software). For remote access authentication, the iPass Services Gateway receives end-user authentication requests from remote users for Internet connectivity via one of the iPass Transaction Centers, and converts and forwards the requests to the services gateway in a format compatible with the enterprise’s authentication database. Once the local enterprise’s authentication database has accepted or rejected the end user’s request for Internet access, this reply is returned via the same three elements in reverse order (iPass Services Gateway to iPass Transaction Center to iPass Network Gateway) to the originating network provider and the accepted user is granted Internet access.
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