Overview
eduroam is a secure, world-wide roaming access service developed for the international research and education community that allows students, researchers and staff from participating institutions to obtain Internet connectivity across campus and when visiting other participating institutions by simply opening their device. To achieve this goal, it is desirable that the eduroam locations are made public so that users can be aware of places where they can successfully connect.
There are however compelling reasons why specific locations might NOT wish to publish their location. This document sets out guidance from the GeGC on this issue.
Requirements
The current eduroam compliance statement creates a requirement for roaming operators to ensure that eduroam locations are published:
“The RO SHOULD publish information about the available points of presence of eduroam (SP sites) in its country or economy in an adequate manner defined by the GeGC (clause 3.6 of the eduroam compliance statement version 2)”
This requirement is intended purely to support end-user discovery – statistical data on end-point numbers is out of scope of this requirement and discussion.
The term SHOULD is used in compliance with RFC2119:
“This word, or the adjective “RECOMMENDED”, mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.”
The Roaming Operator has the ultimate responsibility for deciding on whether there are valid reasons as to why a location might not be published, but guidelines on what might constitute a valid reason are set out below.
Guidelines
Examples of valid reasons for not publishing eduroam locations include (but are not limited to):
- Where there is no public or visitor benefit for publishing the location.
- An example here might be a student residence or school environments where significant roaming would not be expected or desirable.
- Where there are privacy concerns about publishing the location.
- An example here might be where eduroam is deployed in a private residence.
- Where there are security concerns about publishing the location.
- An example here might be where identifying an eduroam location might encourage theft or other opportunistic criminal behaviour.
