Hotspot 2.0 networks are common in airports/airplanes (e.g. Boingo) and are also found in various other locations implemented by cable/cellular providers. These networks allow you to use a secure 8021x access point using the account credentials for your e.g. cable/cellular provider, or via a dedicated account like Boingo. Lots of these services also allow you to roam between networks. The underlying authentication is standard WPA2-Enterprise but Hotspot 2.0 adds a 'discovery' stage to identifiying networks. This discovery is done using ANQP, which queries the network for additional information to determine if the client has the credentials to connect. Because of this network identification capability the hotspot network must be provisioned before hand as you would with 8021x, though the provisioning file requires at least one additional value in addition to the regular 8021x EAP information. Under the Hotspot group NAIRealmNames and HESSID have been added. NAIRealmNames is a required field. HESSID is optional but, if provided, may allow IWD to skip the ANQP step and directly connect (assuming the network advertised HESSID matches). NAIRealmNames is a comma separated list of realms e.g. [Hotspot] NAIRealmNames=realm.example.com,another.realm.com HESSID is simply a MAC address e.g. [Hotspot] HESSID=ab:cd:ef:01:23:67 A side note: Since hotspot's use of ANQP is done before we are connected, it is done via public action frames. This requires the WiFi hardware go offchannel, similar to scans. Because of this scans and ANQP are done on a first come first serve basis in the kernel, which can result in delays. To mitigate this IWD will suspend any scanning until ANQP finishes. There is also a new feature in the 5.3 kernel which notifies userspace when a 'remain-on-channel' action has completed. This feature is only available on mac80211 based driver and is required for IWD to do ANQP reliably. Since not all kernels will have this option right away an option was added to IWD which allows the user to disable ANQP. As a result, this will also disable any hotspot 2.0 network connections unless the HESSID is provided in the configuration file. By default ANQP will be disabled. It can be enabled with: disable_anqp=0