I’m a great fan of the idea of Eduroam Wi-Fi and I’ve been using it and helping others to use it for many years. The idea is simple: You have an Eduroam account at your home university which allows you to not only use the Eduroam Wi-Fi locally for ‘Internet’ access, but also in other places that offer Eduroam. Authentication is then provided by the authentication server of your home institution. Distributed authentication, world wide use, very nice! In Europe, pretty much every university offers Eduroam and in the Nordic countries you even get connectivity in train stations, airports, hospitals and other public places. This is all very nice if it weren’t for two little problems: Port blocking and ‘low signals spilling into the streets’.
I put the term ‘Internet‘ in quotes and italic above because I’ve noticed several times in recent months that many local Eduroam networks perform some kind of port blocking, which often prevents SSH connections to be opened or to access web sites on non-standard ports. I can only assume this is done by local network administrators for ‘security’ reasons, but I can’t think of any positive effect this might have. Pretty much all the rest of the world have no port blocks in place and that works just fine. Actually, port blocking kills automatic use of Eduroam for me, as I require full Internet access and not some firewalled corporate subset of the real thing. The fix: Fortunately, smartphones and computers can be configured to only manually connect to certain Wi-Fi networks. A bit of a shame.
The second reason I have decided to set my Eduroam Wi-Fi profile to manual rather than automatic is signal over-reach. Eduroam has become very popular, so it is not uncommon when walking through cities in Europe (and probably elsewhere as well), to pick up an Eduroam Wi-Fi signal on the street. There are two problems with this. First: The signal is usually only there for a short amount of time and should I have an IP based audio/video call ongoing, it will break the connection for a short time. And secondly, Eduroam networks are usually there for in-house coverage and the signal outside the building is often very weak. If left in automatic mode, my devices would often go from a strong and good cellular network to a weak Eduroam network with very low speed connectivity. This is of course not the fault of local Eduroam networks, it is an inherent technology limitation, or perhaps an implementation issue of my devices that should know better than to connect to a low power Wi-Fi signal and rather stay on a good cellular link.
Fortunately, however, cellular network charges and particularly roaming charges in the EU have come down significantly over the past years, so going cellular first while traveling and switching to Eduroam manually and has become a viable option without too much pain.