Everything you wanted to know about eduroam but were afraid to ask

With billions of authentications every year in thousands of locations across 78 countries you might think that eduroam is an immensely complicated system and something like “Black Magic”.

How after-all does the station WiFi hotspot in Geneva know about your account from a Spanish university  and log you on in the blink of an eye without you having to remember usernames, passwords or indeed do anything?

Well behind the scenes there is quite a lot of very clever technology working away to make lives simple for the millions of students, staff and researchers who use eduroam everyday and one of the beauties of this technology is that it is (usually) invisible.  As Arthur C Clarke once famously said

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And for most people “magic” is all we need to know.  But for those who really do want to know how this magical world of eduroam works then read on…

The team at eduroam have developed a wiki that can tell you how eduroam works so now you can find out what really lies behind the curtain of the little eduroam symbol on your phone.  Happy reading (and don’t say I didn’t warn you)!

 

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