Cybera is seeking municipal and library partners in Alberta who are interested in joining a free service that provides instant Wi-Fi access to a large subset of their visitors: eduroam.
What is eduroam?
Eduroam (education roaming) is the secure, global, Wi-Fi roaming service developed by the international research and education community, and available in more than 100 countries and 17,000 locations worldwide.
In Canada, the eduroam service is managed and operated by CANARIE, a member of the global eduroam Wi-Fi federation.
Why enable eduroam?
Students and faculty from colleges, universities and research facilities make up a significant population of visitors to municipalities and their institutions, including libraries, museums, and airports.
eduroam allows seamless Wi-Fi connectivity for these higher-education guests. As soon as they step foot on the location of a participating organization, their computer or mobile phone automatically connects to the institution’s Wi-Fi.
This not only does away with the need for network administrators to create temporary logins for higher education visitors, it also ensures a secure Wi-Fi login experience for that visitor.
What is the cost?
There is no participation fee for organizations to offer eduroam, and the set-up is fairly simple – in fact, you will likely be able to leverage the Wi-Fi infrastructure you already have in place.
Interested?
Please view this background document from CANARIE, which provides more details about the benefits of eduroam for municipalities (these benefits can apply to any public organization).
Cybera also recently published a blog post about the eduroam installation in all Edmonton Public Library branches, which provides an excellent example of eduroam in action.
If you are interested in learning more about eduroam and how it can benefit your organizations, please contact projects@cybera.ca.