Users will soon be able to avail themselves of Wi-Fi roaming. The Wi-Fi Alliance along with the Wireless Broadband Alliance are developing standards for the new service following the same offering in the mobile industry.

The idea of the initiative is to allow travellers to fire up their PC/tablet/smartphone and have it automatically log onto the nearest Wi-Fi network that has a roaming agreement with the home network.

BT says the plan is quite plausible and involves use of various Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) standards to allow roaming users to securely authenticate themselves without mucking about with password screens and such.

The Wi-Fi Alliance will stick a "Wi-Fi Certified Hotspot" logo to kit supporting the roaming system. However, the partners prefer to avoid a publicly-displayed service mark for compliant networks, preferring to assume that every network will join, while admitting that they still have to work out a precedence mechanism for when more than one network is available.