Release 2 certified devices, but only 119 compared to 1409 in Release 1. At the time of Release 2's announcement, the Wi-Fi Alliance planned to switch certification from Release 1 to Release 2 from April 2015, half a year later. Although it was slightly delayed from there, certification equivalent to Release 2 is currently being implemented. Since then, only 119 devices have been certified over the past three years.
The reason for this is that the situation surrounding hotspots has changed significantly. Back in 2012, LTE commercial services had just started, and line speeds weren't that fast yet, and low-speed 3.5G was widely available, but LTE was still difficult to connect.
For this reason, at that time, there were overwhelmingly many scenes where connecting to a hotspot was faster than connecting to an LTE network. Carriers were especially keen to offer Wi-Fi as an offload destination for LTE, partly because it takes time to develop base stations. This is probably why Passpoint Release 1 was so widely used.
However, in 2015, the installation of base stations for LTE lines and the reinforcement of areas with congestion were completed, and LTE-Advanced services that support CA (Carrier Aggregation) were about to start. At this time, carriers were rather focusing on expanding the use of their own LTE/Advanced LTE lines, and the enhancement of Wi-Fi hotspots was completely postponed.
Moreover, it was a little late in 2016 that devices compatible with "IEEE 802.11ac wave2", which is effective in improving access in crowded places, began to appear on the market. If it had been released a little earlier, the spread of hotspots in public places might have gained momentum, but in reality, the situation that "hotspots are slower than mobile phone lines" was established around this time. After that, the gap will widen further.
In addition, in the case of Japan, outdoor use of the 5GHz band is currently limited to W56 (5150M to 5250MHz), so regardless of indoor use, IEEE 802.11 performance is useful in shopping areas and parks. For the time being, it is expected that it will be difficult to enjoy the benefits of ac, and that congestion will be difficult to resolve. Then, the 2.4 GHz band, which is easy to connect, has clearly lower performance than LTE.
Strictly speaking, there are differences between countries, but basically in Europe and the United States, the 5GHz band is better because it can be used outdoors. use hotspots when cell lines are unavailable for some reason." At least the need for hotspots is not as pervasive as the Wi-Fi Alliance envisioned.
This seems to be the reason why this Release 2 was not fired. By the way, as I wrote at the end of the last time, Release 3 was originally scheduled for 2015, but I think that the reason why there is no news after that is because of the circumstances surrounding Release 2. be