I can fill in a bit of background here, as I was party to some of the early meetings about the London govroam project.
The Wifi provision in the public sector in the UK is a bit of a uncoordinated mess. Every bit of the public sector does their own thing. Public sector colleagues can’t use each others Wifi. So a social worker attending a police station can’t just roam onto the police wifi. A librarian from one council area can’t roam onto another council library wifi elsewhere. And a community healthcare worker has to mess around with guest access when doing outreach at the local hospital. The assumption is that public sector colleagues have plenty of places where they could consume the wifi, and probably do via some guest mechanism, but waste a lot of time (and hence our money) doing that; or end up surviving on 3G/4G services. And there are plenty of mobile notspots. The people who run the UK academic network and eduroam – JISC – have stood up the National Radius Proxy infrastructure for govroam in the UK, and are trying to encourage the public sector to sign up. In places they are pushing against an open door, in others people can’t (yet) see the point. There has been an initial focus on this in London, hence the blog posting you’ve picked up on. JISC have encouraged Universities who are already running eduroam to also turn on govroam. For most of us it’s a pretty simple thing to do, although it’s another SSID. It helps them in their conversations with the public sector to be able to say that your people (police, ambulance, fire, healthcare, social care, council workers) can hop onto good quality Wifi in all these places if you sort out govroam. And in big cities like London that’s a lot of places. So what’s in it for the Universities? At the start the benefit is limited – but when the local council start to turn up govroam (and alongside that eduroam) in their buildings our students can consume their wifi in the local council libraries and sports facilities; maybe at a council office if they need to visit. In some cities where the council provide wide area public wifi you can get a considerable benefit. And when any public sector employees who are govroam enabled arrive on our campuses to assist students or our staff, they can get on with their jobs by being well connected. It’s a long road, the benefits won’t be quick or easy. For some parts of public sector it might require a contract renewal to come up before action is taken, and in general the public sector moves slowly. But if enough of us do it, slowly they will come and join the Wifi roaming party. Honest self-disclosure: we haven’t quite yet had time to enable govroam, but we will soon. One of our buildings is shared with the local council and we need to mess around to provide their Wifi SSIDs on our Infrastructure. When they sign up for an sort our govroam, we wouldn’t need to do that. Hope that helps understanding. It’s not a quick win, more of the start of a journey. _________________________________ Tomo | Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Networks, Telecoms & Security | Information Technology. London Business School | Regent's Park | London NW1 4SA | United Kingdom. Switchboard +44 (0)20 7000 7000 | Direct line +44 (0)20 7000 7777 www.london.edu<http://www.london.edu/> London experience. World impact. Connect with us: [twitter.jpg] <https://twitter.com/LondonBSchool> Follow us on Twitter<https://twitter.com/LondonBSchool> [facebook.jpg] <http://www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/London-Business-School/14027365105> Become a fan on Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/London-Business-School/14027365105> From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Mike Atkins Sent: 04 January 2018 17:06 To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Eduroam and Govroam Thanks Philippe, that long term explanation makes sense. Like Lee, we have students abroad. I sent a quick FYI to our Infosec team to let them know users may eventually see eduroam at new locations and reminded them proper device configuration is important. Our joke/explanation in the past had been about seeing eduroam along the toll road and that you shouldn’t join it. So much for that one. Mike Atkins Network Engineer Office of Information Technology University of Notre Dame From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>] On Behalf Of Philippe Hanset Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 11:39 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU<mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Eduroam and Govroam Mike et al., We are starting a Govroam pilot here in the US (www.govroam.us<http://www.govroam.us>) with local and state government and eventually federal. We don’t envision many schools adding the Govroam SSID or Government agencies adding the eduroam SSID unless there very specific use cases. On the other end by creating those two roaming communities early on we (as all of us) will be ready when Passpoint/Hotspot2.0 becomes more wide spread. Once your infrastructure supports Hotspot2.0 you will be able to add local/state/federal roaming communities to your network quite easily. Adding a roaming community to the broadcast frame of Hotspot2.0 will be so much easier than adding yet another SSID! We do not know all your use cases (gov/edu) of course, feel free to share so we can design accordingly. (please excuse our laconic govroam and anyroam websites we are in the middle of completely revamping them with useful info) and BTW, Happy New Year y’all :) Philippe Philippe Hanset, CEO www.anyroam.net<http://www.anyroam.net> www.eduroam.us<http://www.eduroam.us> +1 (865) 236-0770 GPG key id: 0xF2636F9C On Jan 4, 2018, at 8:34 AM, Mike Atkins <matk...@nd.edu<mailto:matk...@nd.edu>> wrote: Does anyone have more detail on this? More public Wi-Fi across London with Eduroam & Govroam https://wifinowevents.com/news-and-blog/public-wi-fi-across-london-eduroam-govroam/ Mike Atkins Network Engineer Office of Information Technology University of Notre Dame Phone: 574-631-7210 ---- .__o ----- _-\_<, --- (*)/'(*) ********** 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. ********** 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.
