Eduroam Comes to Concordia

University Joins Worldwide Education Network

NewsPierre Chauvin — Published June 8, 2011

Short for Education Roaming, Eduroam allows network members to connect to the Internet when visiting fellow Eduroam campuses.

The service will make accessing the Internet at Concordia much easier for external members on campus, said Mike Babin, Assistant Director of Communications at IITS.

“One problem that’s been here for a long time is when we have visitors, like visiting professors [and] researchers, or when we hold conferences for academics from other institutions, the very first thing people want is to provide wireless service for them, and that’s usually kind of a hassle,” said Babin. “It’s much easier [now] because we don’t have to manage accounts for them.”

Concordia students can now use their MyConcordia account to use the McGill, Université de Montréal, École Polytechnique or HEC Montréal Internet networks when on these campuses. But they can also go way further, as Eduroam members include 29 universities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific region.

Babin said that Eduroam’s impact on the Internet speed on campus will be negligible. “[Looking] at the University’s infrastructure,” he said, “relatively few of the access points […], have a lot of students on them.”

Mario Therrien, Directeur du Bureau des services aux utilisateurs (BSU) from Université de Montréal said that UdeM has been using Eduroam since June 2009, but that the university didn’t advertise the service to students because its main purpose was for academic conferences.

“The more universities that become members, the better it will be because […] professors tend to have relationships with other universities and visit those universities. So it’s very convenient for them that they don’t have to rely on guest accounts that need to be created on demand.”

“Without word of mouth, we had the Eduroam service running [at Concordia] for a few weeks before we actually announced it and there were people using it already,” said Babin. “I think my last statistics show something like 50 people, one of them from Europe.”

The Link did a test run of Eduroam on the McGill Campus. The result of this daring act of investigative journalism? A successful Internet connection.