[Ottawa, ON]

CANARIE, a vital component of Canada’s digital infrastructure supporting research, education and innovation, today announced that Canadian higher education students, researchers, and staff used the eduroam Wi-Fi mobile roaming service an average of one million times per day during the month of September.

The eduroam service allows students, researchers and staff from participating institutions to seamlessly access campus Wi-Fi networks when visiting other participating institutions. Eduroam automatically authenticates using the username and password (credentials) of a visitor’s home institution, eliminating the need to request a guest account to access Wi-Fi services at each new site. This new milestone highlights the mobility of Canadian students, staff, and faculty who regularly travel and move across campuses to pursue their studies and research, and underlines the stability and reach of the eduroam platform to support their activities.

eduroam is offered via the Canadian Access Federation, a CANARIE program, and has grown from supporting one million logins a month in 2012, to its current load averaging one million logins per workday.

“The growth of eduroam is no surprise, given how mobile the student population is today, and how easy it is for students to access,” says Bo Wandschneider, CIO of the University of Toronto. “For institutions, it provides a secure gateway for us to support our own and visiting students, staff and faculty, and reduces the load on our IT team since they don’t need to worry about managing guest Wi-Fi accounts.”

The Canadian Access Federation was incubated by CUCCIO, and in 2010 the service was passed on to CANARIE, which has supported its evolution and growth since that time.

More information on eduroam and Federated Identity Management solutions, both offered through CANARIE’s Canadian Access Federation, may be found here.

For more information, contact:

Ela Ienzi
Director, Communications
CANARIE
[email protected] | 613-943-5432

About CANARIE

CANARIE strengthens Canadian leadership in science and technology by delivering digital infrastructure to support world-class research that directly benefits all Canadians.

Thirteen provincial and territorial network partners, together with CANARIE, collectively form Canada’s National Research and Education Network (NREN). Canadians at universities, colleges, research institutes, hospitals, and government laboratories rely on this ultra high-speed network to collaborate in data-intensive, cutting-edge research and innovation within Canada and with colleagues in over 100 countries.

Beyond the network, CANARIE funds and promotes reusable research software tools to accelerate scientific discovery. CANARIE also supports Research Data Canada as it leads national research data management initiatives, and through the Canadian Access Federation, provides identity management services that enable secure, ubiquitous connectivity and content access to the academic community. To boost commercialization in Canada’s technology sector, CANARIE offers cloud resources to startups through its DAIR service, and links a powerful community of public and private sector partners in the Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks (CENGN).

Established in 1993, CANARIE is a non-profit corporation, with the majority of its funding provided by the Government of Canada.