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If you are not sure whether or not your institution provides eduroam at all, the National Roaming Operator for your country may be able to help with your enquiry. To find out more, follow the linked maps from http://www.eduroam.org/
eduroam network characteristics
eduroam networks are provided by participating institutions locally in their own responsibility. As a roaming consortium, eduroam defines minimul compliance rules on how hotspot deployments need to look like; you can think of this as a "franchise" system.
As a result, not all eduroam hotspots are identical. You can expect the following baseline configuration at eduroam hotspots:
- Use is free of charge.
- The wireless network is encrypted with WPA2/AES.
- Your username and password is exclusively validated with IEEE 802.1X as above.
- The network gives you access to the general internet.
- In Europe, a minimum number of services ("ports") must be made available at the hotspot. The list includes sending and receiving email (encrpytedly and unencryptedly), browsing web pages (encrpytedly and unencryptedly), and access to a wide variety of Virtual Private Networking (VPN) solutions which can connect you back to your home institution in privacy. The full list of ports is available in section6.3.3 "Specifications and Operational Requirements: Service Providers" (p.31+) of the European eduroam Service Definition.
Apart from that, you should consider every eduroam network as a "normal ISP" network. In particular, the WPA2/AES encryption only protects your traffic while it is in the air; as soon as it travels onwards onto the internet, your traffic is not encrypted any more unless you chose to use encrypted transfer protocols (e.g. browse with https:// instead of http:// ; or if you started a VPN connection).
eduroam Service Providers are not encouraged to inspect traffic of their users; they should rather act as a "mere conduit" provider. It is however possible that some eduroam Service Providers choose to inspect or filter traffic (by using transparent web proxies).
If you do not choose to encrypt your traffic on your device, everybody on the internet may be able to see the content of your communication in clear-text; record it or create profiles from it. This is not eduroam-specific; it's the way the internet works.
eduroam hotspots world-wide
eduroam is a world-wide effort. Currently, eduroam Points of Presence are located on three continents. eduroam Operations is preparing a world-wide map with all positions on all continents. Until that service is online, please consult the four region-specific maps:
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