Eduroam update (2018 April 24)
More Eduroam access points were installed today.
The incremental upgrade to the school Eduroam provision continues, and half-a-dozen more access points (AP) were commissioned in the school today. This means that we believe that very roughly 50% of the school is now within decent range of an Eduroam AP. In particular, we believe that most student areas are now covered by Eduroam.
It's hard to be certain of how close we are to full coverage, given the topology and construction of the building. We're continuing to gather the pennies to buy more (with hardware, licences and installation costs, they come in at of order £1000 per AP), and these pennies may come via IT Services initiatives, or from college infrastructure funds.
As Eduroam coverage spreads, we'll decommission GUPHYSICS
and KELVIN
APs. Yes, it would be nice to keep the two networks working in parallel,
but rival APs seem determined to squabble if they're within range of each
other – this probably comes down to a mixture of WiFi protocol reasons,
and Maxwell's equations.
Because of this selective decommissioning, and depending on where you are located, it's possible that you will have WiFi difficulties you didn't have before. In this case, please contact either Jon or Norman. If in contrast you're suffused with newly networked bliss, feel free to let us know about that, too.
In the longer term, there are plans to create an ‘internet of things’ wireless network, which will (in broad terms) allow unauthenticated connection, but very restricted access. This is intended to support a specific set of teaching and research uses. If you think this will present opportunities for your teaching or research, please comment to Jon or Norman.