eduroam is a project with the purpose of setting up the wireless LAN roaming infrastructure among the international research and education community for facilitating the share of wireless access in the member institutions.
The initiative in eduroam started in 2003, and the first testing was conducted by institutions in five different Europe countries. Afterward other national research networks and education institutions in Europe take part in this infrastructure one after another. Finally this infrastructure is named “eduroam”, meaning “Education Roaming”.
Currently, eduroam in Europe is already a mature and large-scale WiFi roaming infrastructure. In Asia-Pacific region, Asia-Pacific Advance Network Consortium (APAN) takes the initiative to start the eduroam project. The development of eduroam has progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years. Nowadays, the infrastructure of eduroam Asia-Pacific, covering countries and regions like Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong (SAR), Taiwan, Mainland China, Japan and Macao (SAR), becomes an important portion of the global eduroam infrastructure.
Use of eduroam is very simple. All users would get wireless network access using the same credentials as at their home institution, when they are in partners’ institutions around the world.
For the eduroam Macao, the University of Macau is the first institution in 2009 participating in this roaming infrastructure, and takes the initiative in managing the infrastructure for the Macao region as well as providing technical consultation and pre-examination for membership approval.