Hotspot Services: Central Office Requirements

Normally 802.16 would not be used to deliver hotspot services directly to a customer; rather,
the connection to the customer would occur over the 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) protocol,
and an 802.11 base station aggregating hotspot traffic may then utilize 802.16 for backhaul to a
central office.
Hotspots represent a fairly new service category, and little uniformity exists in terms of the
equipment used to enable them. In the case where a broadband wireless metro service is
deploying the hotspots, the usual practice would be to place the customer database, authentication
function, and billing within the central office. The authentication would most likely take
place within a separate authentication server, but the billing and administrative software could
reside on the same servers used by the network at large. Separate billing software would probably
be required because of the prevalence of roaming and credit card transactions in hotspots.