Mobile roaming for universities

Researchers, faculty, staff and students in these nations now have seamless access to the secure eduroam wifi service worldwide. eduroam was developed to meet the needs of the research and education community and was first deployed in Europe in 2003. It is now available at over 12,000 locations in more than 76 countries globally.

What is so convenient about eduroam is that it removes the burden of administrating guest password access by allowing users to access wifi wherever in the world eduroam is available using their existing home credentials.

The recent expansion of eduroam across the Asia Pacific is the work of the TEIN eduroam project, a collaboration between TEIN*CC, AARNet (Australia), Chungnam National University and KISTI (Korea), REANNZ (New Zealand), and SingAREN (Singapore) to bring the benefits of eduroam to research and education users in these seven Asia Pacific countries with limited or no existing coverage.

AARNet was responsible for the overall project management.

Training local staff

The challenge the TEIN eduroam project partners faced was not only to extend eduroam to an additional seven countries, but also to equip local staff with the expertise to manage and extend the service in the future.

Over a period of 18 months, the project partners worked with local NRENs to deploy eduroam. Three institutions in each country were selected to participate in the initial deployment.

The project first procured and installed the basic infrastructure, including servers to authenticate eduroam requests and wireless access points for testing and establishing coverage.

In addition to hardware, dedicated administration and monitoring tools were developed to help improve the operation and reporting of the eduroam installations. Covering log analysis, metric reporting, and development information, the tools are publicly available.

Training was then delivered to equip the NROs with the skills to manage their eduroam infrastructure, and to in turn be able to train IT staff at their institutions to implement further eduroam hotspots.

View training material for NROs.

View training material for institution IT staff.

With Bhutan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Pakistan and Sri Lanka all now operating their own national infrastructure, and local staff equipped with the skills to operate and implement the service, the countries will be able to continue to develop their eduroam coverage.

Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have already progressed their deployments to include additional sites outside the scope of this project.

More information

For more information about the TEIN eduroam project in Asia, please contact us.