Almost a year ago, Microsoft announced that the company will be bringing Hotspot 2.0 support to Windows 10 Mobile. Today, we can confirm that Microsoft will be adding Hotspot 2.0 support to Windows 10 Mobile with the Redstone release, and this feature should be coming to Insiders in the coming weeks. For those unfamiliar, Hotspot 2.0 allows users to seamlessly move from one hotspot to another on a network, without having to authenticate separately for each one.

Hotspot 2.0, also known as HS2 and Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint, is an approach to public access Wi-Fi by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The idea is for mobile devices to automatically join a Wi-Fi subscriber service whenever the user enters a Hotspot 2.0 area, in order to provide better bandwidth and services-on-demand to end-users, while also alleviating mobile carrier infrastructure of traffic overheads. Hotspot 2.0 is based on the IEEE 802.11u standard, which is a set of protocols published in 2011 to enable cellular-like roaming. If the device supports 802.11u and is subscribed to a Hotspot 2.0 service it will automatically connect and roam.

In Windows 10 Mobile Redstone, when you enable Hotspot 2.0, the available Hotspot 2.0 networks will appear in the Wi-Fi networks list. As we stated earlier, this feature should be coming to Insiders sometime soon, and it should be coming to the public with the Anniversary Update.