When a student or professor travels to another college campus, hopping online to check e-mail or surf the Web is usually difficult. Most college networks require a local user name and password to log on, and guest accounts can be a hassle to obtain.
Now a few colleges in the United States are joining a system that lets visitors log on to their networks using a login and password from another college.
The system, called eduroam, is already popular in Europe, where more than a thousand institutions participate. In the United States, fewer than 10 institutions are members so far, but the numbers are growing.
Louisiana State University, which hooked into eduroam on its campus last month, is the most recent American institution to join. Brian D. Voss, the university’s chief information officer, explained that the primary purpose is “to allow visiting scholars the easy ability to get on the Web” while still verifying that a person is a professor or student.
“Campuses are very security conscious,” Mr. Voss said. “It’s not like we’re a Starbucks, where we advertise an open wireless infrastructure.”
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville tried eduroam in 2004 as an experiment. Philippe Hanset, a network architect at the university, said that eduroam has been in a dormant period in the United States since 2004 and is just now regaining popularity.
The Tennessee campus is leading the effort to broaden the use of eduroam, and Mr. Hanset said that he has recently started hearing inquiries about the service on a weekly basis. Among the other institutions that support eduroam are the University of Tennessee Space Institute and Harvard University. Yale University is in the process of joining.
Mr. Hanset said that he hopes to make eduroam compatible with the already popular InCommon Federation, a standard that colleges use to help coordinate the sharing of resources across campuses.
9 Responses to Service Lets Professors Log On to Networks on Other Campuses
emmadw - January 23, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Speaking from the point of view of a UK based Chronicle reader, I’ve found Eduroam incredibly useful! I’ve used it in various UK Universities, in Majorca, though I didn’t get to test it out in Beijing, though some of the Universities there have it, apparently!
mbelvadi - January 25, 2010 at 8:49 am
With the accelerating growth in high speed cell data networks, I would think that this product would become increasingly unnecessary as more people in the economic class described in the article would have personal portable devices that essentially contain their own wireless network and web-based access. Also increasingly, these services make available the ability to connect a full-size laptop to them as well. Eduroam sounds to me like a technology on the cusp of being obsolete.
raccoonmario - January 25, 2010 at 10:56 am
This sounds very useful.
mardel39 - January 25, 2010 at 1:03 pm
I hope I gave you the right spelling, but this is what I was looking at on other web pages.
texasmusic - January 25, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Who gives a hoot about email and surfing the web? The real reason this is useful is giving these visiting scholars the temporary ability to use library resources for research. If you can’t get on your own college’s system because you’re not there and you can’t get on the local college’s system because you don’t belong to a permanent user group, you’re hamstrung. If this is a possibility, I’m on board!
11890636 - January 25, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Regarding comment (2), there are several reasons why Eduroam would still be useful even as high-speed cell service proliferates:- Many campuses are in rural areas that do not offer latest-greatest cellular services- Even in urban areas, many campus locations do not offer solid reception to all cellular carriers, especially indoors – 3G Cellular is substantially slower than WiFi. A recent test of 3G in major cities found data rates of 1.2 to 1.5 megabits/second, whereas commonly-deployed Wifi (802.11g) offers 54 Mbps (shared among multiple users of the same access point, to be sure), and next-gen 802.11N will offer 600 Mbps. – Eduroam also supports hard-wired Ethernet connections with commonly-offered data rates of 100 Mbps (“fast Ethernet”) and 1,000 Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet). – Some cellular providers charge more for high-volume data transfer- Tethering (i.e., connecting the cell phone to the laptop, via cable or Bluetooth wireless) is inherently complicated, with two devices, two batteries to keep charged, et al.
cashuler - January 25, 2010 at 6:26 pm
In response to comment #2 “this product would become increasingly unnecessary as more people in the economic class described in the article would have personal portable devices that essentially contain their own wireless network and web-based access”Please do not assume that because someone is an academic that they can afford the fairly expensive plans still required for this access. Remember that graduate students (who would almost definitely not fall into a group with extra money to expend) also visit other campuses. I’ve looked into the cost of some of the all areas access for wireless internet and it is significantly cost-prohibitve as well as limited in range of access (both points are mentioned by #6).I am completely in support of a system like Eduroam. Imagine how useful this would be at conferences!
11890636 - January 25, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Re comment (5), Eduroam provides access to the entire Internet via the wireless and/or wired network of an affiliated institution, which requires that you have proper credentials (ID, password) from your home institution. Once authenticated, you are a guest on the local network, with authorization to use which ever resources (bibliographic and full-text databases, for example) the institution makes available to its guests. Similarly you have access to which ever resources your home institution makes available to remote users — i.e., the resources you can access from your home Internet provider or a hotel. So Eduroam is a scheme to provide remote “authentication” in locations where such authentication is required for Internet access; it does not automatically provide “authorization” to use either local or remote resources. Authorization protocols for on-campus guests and remote users will vary from institution to institution.
billso - January 25, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Some faculty and students do not want to spend money for a 3G or 4G connection – and as others have discussed, some universities have much faster bandwidth. Paired with InCommon, eduroam is an interesting model.