In Nebraska, eduroam has been adopted by about 75 percent of K-12 schools and counting, according to Brett Bieber, chair of the eduroam U.S. Advisory Committee and assistant vice president for information technology services at the University of Nebraska.
“Now we have, within the school district’s tool set, the ability to give that Chromebook to a student and know that they can connect seamlessly to the Internet at all of those other locations across Nebraska, across the United States, across the world,” he said. “They just open their laptop, and it’s automatically connected.”
Bieber said his hope is that, as more states embrace eduroam for K-12, fewer students will be stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.
“We still need to build out connectivity, we still need to continue on and expand everyone’s access to the Internet, but this can certainly play a role,” Bieber said. “It allows us to leverage those existing investments and make them more accessible to people.”
In his state, the K-12 eduroam effort was led by Network Nebraska, an entity that provides fiber connectivity to nearly every public school in the state. Pandemic-relief funds got the program off the ground in 2021, Bieber said, but Network Nebraska has since been able to fund the service without raising member rates.
SECURE ACCESS
Part of eduroam's pitch to users is that its connections are more secure than public Wi-Fi networks, and that students and staff from any eduroam-subscribed institution have wireless access at any eduroam service location. There are about 3,300 eduroam service locations in the U.S. and more than 38,000 internationally, the program’s website shows.
Higher education institutions have been able to subscribe to the service since 2003 in Europe and 2009 in the United States. In 2020, the nonprofit coalition Internet2, which oversees eduroam in America, opened the roaming access program to K-12 schools and other sites where primary and secondary students learn, such as libraries, museums and community centers.
The service has since spread to more than 330 K-12 districts and related locations across seven states, the coalition reports. The K-12 eduroam program is up and running in Arizona, Connecticut, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Utah, according to InCommon, the identity and access management division of Internet2. Michigan and Minnesota were approved last fall to follow suit.
THE NETWORK EFFECT
As described on Internet2's website, bringing eduroam to a state's K-12 sector requires a state regional network or community anchor institution to submit a proposal to Internet2 to become an eduroam Support Organization. If approved, that entity then funds the service for the state’s K-12 sites and works to scale and manage eduroam access across those locations. The cost depends on a number of factors, and specific technology is required to subscribe and authenticate users.
It's an involved process that has so far been rolled out at a rate of about two states per year, according to Kevin Morooney, vice president of trust and identity at Internet2 and the former chief information officer at Penn State.
“It’s not something you can just decide to do on a whim and write a proposal. ... There’s a lot of preparedness,” he said. “We’ve got almost 1,200 universities connected at this point, but none of them just flipped a switch.”
What makes the work worthwhile, Morooney said, is the program’s “network effect,” which means that as more institutions subscribe to eduroam, more students and staff have easy, secure access to wireless networks in their own communities and around the world.
