Eduroam makes accessing Wi-Fi on campuses easy, quick

UW-River Falls students who visit other universities, or students from elsewhere who visit UWRF, can easily access wireless Internet thanks to a service called Eduroam.

Eduroam stands for education roaming and it allows students, faculty and staff to gain immediate access to a campus’ Wi-Fi if it participates in the Eduroam service. Anyone with an uwrf.edu Internet account can connect to other Wi-Fi networks at participating Eduroam campuses.

All students, faculty and staff at UWRF have access to Eduroam as there is no sign-up needed to use the service. The only thing they need to do is see if the campus they are at has Eduroam. If it does, a student, faculty or staff member just needs to use their UWRF credentials to login.

According to Chief Information Officer Steve Reed, the Division of Technology Services (DoTS) has made it easy for those visiting UWRF to access the service.

“On our campus, we have made that easy by using the name ‘Eduroam’ as the name of the wireless network,” Reed said via email. “So, for our campus member, or people visiting us from other campuses that are members of Eduroam, they just need to login.”

Eduroam was introduced to UWRF late last spring and has been a service that DoTS has been looking to add for years, Reed said.

“There has been a push across UW System to get all campuses to be a member of Eduroam so as student, faculty and staff visit other campuses, they can use their own campus credentials to access Wi-Fi resources,” he added.

At this point around three-fourths of UW system campuses are using Eduroam. The service also is widely used by many U.S. and international universities. If a UWRF student visits a campus in England that uses the Eduroam service they will have the same immediate access as if they were visiting another UW system campus.

According to Reed, the Eduroam service is all about making it easier to securely access wireless networks. Reed explained that when students, faculty or staff from other UW system schools visit UWRF, they use the Eduroam service as it is quicker and easier to use than the guest network the campus offers.

“I do know that when on-campus meetings occur with other UW campuses, that the campuses that are members of Eduroam, do use our Eduroam wireless network,” Reed said. “They have found that to be very helpful as they don’t have to seek out a special guest account or use the slower ‘guest’ network.”

According to the Eduroam website, the service has around 100,000 wireless access points that share a Service Set Identifier (SSID), which acts like one big worldwide hotspot.

For further information on Eduroam, visit eduroam.us.