T.J., I am a tremendous advocate and proponent for Eduroam as a common good service that our campuses should adopt wherever possible.
At the most tactical/self-interested side, in most of our cases, we have significant numbers of study abroad students as well as faculty who are doing sabbaticals, research, conferences, meetings and other activities around the world. One of my previous universities counted the number of international travelers annually and it approached being a five digit number! Many of those trips are to universities; and, the vast majority of those schools — particularly in Europe but also in Canada, Asia, Latin America and other places — are using Eduroam. The seamlessness of the experience it provides is terrific. Your users immediate get an authenticated, secure connection at thousands of institutions in exchange for allowing within-higher ed roaming on your network. And it can simplify your own support/help requests for your own network. (I once heard a horror story of an international education program at an Asian university where the 60 students/multiple faculty were getting new weekly guest credentials for a two month program — when if they had known about Eduroam, which was in use on the campus, all that hassle on both sides would have been avoided.) I know of a significant number of schools that are deprecating their own named wireless networks and using Eduroam for both their own users and their EDU visitors. This has the advantage of making sure that your own users are (properly) onboarded to Eduroam while at home, so they can roam without difficulty. Make sure to require the realm for your local users. Davidson expects to migrate to Eduroam as our sole campus 802.1x/secure network this year. To your question: yes, it is pretty straightforward and common to segment your campus users from visitors and to give different experiences; iirc, the Eduroam expectation is for only a limited number of ports/services at minimum. At a broader level — to me Eduroam is an example of the benefits that happen when higher ed collaborates. I have been in this industry to remember, vaguely, the bad-old-days when NSFNet was going away in the mid-1990s and all of our institutions were about to get the bandwidth and cost screws put to us by private sector telcos. The birth of Internet2 (and state RENs, and other actors) was in response to that and was from a spirit that higher ed working together across boundaries can deliver services in the common good. Eduroam — which actually originated via GEANT in Europe as an initiative before coming to the US — is to my mind an incredibly successful cross-institutional win for universities and research, but it only works if we all participate. </soapbox> Kevin -- Kevin Davis Deputy CIO & Director, Core Services Davidson College ITS (704) 894-2405 (office) | (919) 599-8194 (mobile) From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of "McClintic, Thomas" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 5:21 PM To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] EDUROAM Service Fees Thoughts Good Afternoon, We have not yet implemented EDUROAM, but began looking into it as it was part of our Internet2 subscription. It now appears that they have changed the service to have an annual fee, plus price per enrolled student. Our feelings are that implementing now with an added fee does not seem likely. We have done without the service this long and our faculty/students are not using it, so no disconnect of services for them. I wanted to know others feeling on the subject. Do you plan to continue with the service given the prorate charged back of 2016? Are you segmenting campus visitors from other institutions away from your users, and could this not be accomplished with a guest network? Do you feel the cost of the service is reasonable given the use your institution has? Thank you for any responses! TJ McClintic ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
