On Nov 12, 2012, at 6:39 PM, Lee H Badman wrote:
Does anyone keep stats on how much your Eduroam efforts get used? Like, other than just being in the club, is it really providing benefits that an easy-to-use guest network wouldn't? Not being snarky, but genuinely wondering.
Not actual stats, but we are so tiny that anecdote covers pretty much all of our cases. As it happens, last summer when we were first testing eduroam, and had it deployed only to one AP in our office, we got an email from a math prof who was going to a conference in Germany. The advance material they sent her suggested that eduroam was the best way to connect at the conference campus, and she wanted to know if we had that. So, we got her connected to on our test AP, and it worked for her in both Germany and Scotland. More recently, a few IT and Library staff used it at the EDUCAUSE conference. Thus, so far, only about 2% of our users have connected to Eduroam at a remote site. We've not noticed any eduroam guests here yet, but we are small and out of the way.
My sense is that in the US it is still very much in the chicken-and- egg stage: It is not so useful yet, because it is not so widely deployed; and thus no one feels the need to deploy it. However, looks like in Europe there is very solid coverage, so I assume that it is more heavily used there. I hope enough people deploy it to make it more widely useful here, but even if not, it's useful enough: I haven't really seen any downside to our deployment, as we already were doing 802.1x, so it was not much effort to change to a new SSID. Thus, even if the benefit is only for the occasional professor or student traveling overseas, it seems useful enough to cover the hassle of deployment.
(Also, being in the club seems pretty cool to me :-) Steve Bohrer Network Admin Bard College at Simon's Rock 413-528-7645 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
