WBA/IETF Connect-Info Implementation under way

[Alan DeKok]

On Oct 7, 2025, at 3:03 PM, Joey Padden <jpadden at helium.com> wrote:
> If you’d rather see a VSA, do you have thoughts on which parameters you’d want in Connect-Info and which you’d want moved to a VSA?

  Ideally, everything in the WBA spec is visible in a VSA.  My goal is not to prevent the WBA work from moving ahead, but to ensure that the data is easily manageable in normal RADIUS attributes.

> WBA has a Vendor-ID and has some precedence for defining VSAs. So this path can be explored further.

  It shouldn't be too hard to define one "WBA-Connect-Info" VSA which in turn contains other child attributes.  This is done for many other VSAs.

> The current set of metrics Wi-Fi roaming operators are asking for is:
> 
> • Connect Speed
> • Wi-Fi Standard
> • Channel
> • Band
> • RSSI
> • RSSI Minimum
> • Noise Level
> • Channel Utilization
> • TxBitRate
> • RxBitRate
> • Frame Loss
> • Frame Retry
> • Backhaul Downlink Throughput
> • Backhaul Uplink Throughput
> • Backhaul Latency
> • STA count connected to radio
> 
> Do you have a format you’d rather see that is more parsable? I think Mark and Josh chose ABNF syntax as it’s defined and standard. Would you two be advocates for multiple VSAs, one for each parameter or for a similar ABNF syntax just not in Connect-Info?

  I would suggest using the standard RADIUS data types from RFC8044 for the VSAs.  I can't recall too many other RADIUS attributes which are data type "string", and then where the contents are defined by ABNF. 

  Alan DeKok.