Eduroam

eduroam

EDUcation ROAMing
Purpose	International authentication infrastructure
Region served	Worldwide
Parent organization	TERENA
Website	www.eduroam.org

eduroam (education roaming) is an international roaming service for users in research, higher education and further education. It provides researchers, teachers and students easy and secure network access when visiting an institution other than their own. Authentication of users is performed by their home institution, using the same credentials as when they access the network locally, while authorization to access the Internet and possibly other resources is handled by the visited institution. Users do not have to pay for using eduroam.

The service is provided at the local level by the participating institutions (universities, colleges, research institutes etc.). At the national level it is organised by National Roaming Operators, which are in many cases the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) of their countries. At the global level, the organisation of the eduroam service is under the auspices of TERENA, which is also the holder of the eduroam® trademark. The eduroam Architecture for Network Roaming is defined in RFC 7593.

In some countries, Internet access via eduroam is also available at other locations than the participating institutions, e.g. in libraries, public buildings, railway stations and airports.

In Belgium, Belnet uses the eduroam technology to provide a similar service to Belgian public administrations under the name govroam. A govroam service for municipalities in the Netherlands was launched in October 2013. govroam® is a registered trademark of Belnet.

The eduroam initiative started in 2002 when during the preparations for the creation of TERENA's task force TF-Mobility Klaas Wierenga of SURFnet shared the idea of combining a RADIUS-based infrastructure with IEEE 802.1X technology to provide roaming network access across research and education networks. Initially the service was joined by institutions in the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Portugal, Croatia and the United Kingdom. Later, other NRENs in Europe embraced the idea and started joining the infrastructure, which was then called eduroam. Since 2004 the European Union co-funded further research and development work related to the eduroam service through the GN2 and GN3 projects. From September 2007 the European Union funded through these projects also the continued operation and maintenance of the eduroam service at the European level.