HW090: Inside eduroam

We've had some other, um, Heavy Wireless episodes on eduroam, specifically in Canada, and they have obviously a, a different service, and they offer different features to their schools.

Yeah.

I learned a lot more about this when I attended, um...

I got the opportunity to attend this year a conference that happens annually.

It's run by GÉANT, which is kind of like the Internet2 of Europe.

They, um, brought together people from around the world, national research and education members, and I got to meet the eduroam people from, like, many, many countries.

Um, and one thing I learned is that I- I think I had a little bit of a feeling going into that, that, ugh, the US, you know, there's things we don't have.

I was very aware of the things we don't have.

We don't have eduroam visitor [laughs] access, which you had an episode where you talked to Cheryl about how they have this great imple- implementation of eduroam visitor access in Canada.

Um, right now we're not doing any RADsec.

And we would love to have it here.

[laughs] Right? Uh, we're not doing any RADsec.

Uh, in Europe, they have this great product called Get Eduroam.

It's hosted by the, like, Regional Education Network, and it allows sites, if they have, like, Cloud Identity, like Entra, they can...

They don't even have to have a local RADIUS server, which is a big blocker for a lot of smaller sites who want to be...

They wanna join eduroam, they don't have a RADIUS server.

So they can do that all just with identity, and the, the, um, Research and Education Network facilitates that.

So I kinda went into...

When I was going to TIEMC, I was like, "Ugh, there's a lot of things we don't have," exactly what you're describing.

[laughs] But one thing I kind of saw coming out of that experience, like, really clearly is, like, every country's eduroam deployment is really influenced by, like, features that are not really changeable in that country.

So the US, we're just really big.

We have the biggest eduroam deployment, uh, with over 1,200 sites, and we also had kind of an interesting way that we got started where we were originally run by folks at a university, and then we transitioned over to being run directly by Internet2.

So both of those, like, specific aspects of our history really influence, like, what we have.

Because we're so big, we had to put a lot of energy into automation in the background.

So something [laughs] that subscribers don't necessarily get to see, but anybody who's set up an eduroam site knows you have this Federation Manager, which is...

We've had some other, um, Heavy Wireless episodes on eduroam, specifically in Canada, and they have obviously a, a different service, and they offer different features to their schools.

Yeah.

I learned a lot more about this when I attended, um...

I got the opportunity to attend this year a conference that happens annually.

It's run by GÉANT, which is kind of like the Internet2 of Europe.

They, um, brought together people from around the world, national research and education members, and I got to meet the eduroam people from, like, many, many countries.

Um, and one thing I learned is that I- I think I had a little bit of a feeling going into that, that, ugh, the US, you know, there's things we don't have.

I was very aware of the things we don't have.

We don't have eduroam visitor [laughs] access, which you had an episode where you talked to Cheryl about how they have this great imple- implementation of eduroam visitor access in Canada.

Um, right now we're not doing any RADsec.

And we would love to have it here.

[laughs] Right? Uh, we're not doing any RADsec.

Uh, in Europe, they have this great product called Get Eduroam.

It's hosted by the, like, Regional Education Network, and it allows sites, if they have, like, Cloud Identity, like Entra, they can...

They don't even have to have a local RADIUS server, which is a big blocker for a lot of smaller sites who want to be...

They wanna join eduroam, they don't have a RADIUS server.

So they can do that all just with identity, and the, the, um, Research and Education Network facilitates that.

So I kinda went into...

When I was going to TIEMC, I was like, "Ugh, there's a lot of things we don't have," exactly what you're describing.

[laughs] But one thing I kind of saw coming out of that experience, like, really clearly is, like, every country's eduroam deployment is really influenced by, like, features that are not really changeable in that country.

So the US, we're just really big.

We have the biggest eduroam deployment, uh, with over 1,200 sites, and we also had kind of an interesting way that we got started where we were originally run by folks at a university, and then we transitioned over to being run directly by Internet2.

So both of those, like, specific aspects of our history really influence, like, what we have.

Because we're so big, we had to put a lot of energy into automation in the background.

So something [laughs] that subscribers don't necessarily get to see, but anybody who's set up an eduroam site knows you have this Federation Manager, which is...