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School of Physics and Astronomy – computing
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A few new Eduroam access points (2022 July 28)

We now have a few new Eduroam Access Points (APs) in P&A.

Central IT managed to find us half-a-dozen APs, that they were keeping back for spares, which they installed today to fill in significant gaps in the Eduroam coverage in P&A.

The gaps were identified based on a survey of the building done last month. That survey suggested locations for of order 100 new APs, to appear in the fullness of time, to provide the targeted level of coverage. But it also exposed a couple of clear gaps where one or two APs could make a big difference, in terms of the density of people who'd get at least some Eduroam signal in their office. Users in the south-east corner of the building, and in the research wing, should notice some difference. Others... not so much (sorry).

We'll tentatively disable KELVIN and GUPHYSICS coverage in these areas, since doing so will stop that network and Eduroam fighting.

Other news: There is an ongoing issue with Eduroam, which happens across campus, where the Eduroam system seems to drop service for a subset of users at connection time. IT Services continue to chase the cause of this problem, but hope it will be addressed by a planned software upgrade this summer. If this happens to you, it might be helpful to have your laptop forget the network, and then reauthenticate from scratch.

The future and the NIIP: The changes today are a stopgap. The survey was done as part of the Network Infrastructure Improvement Programme (NIIP), Phase 5 of which – comprising major and long-overdue improvements to networking infrastructure across campus, including pervasive WiFi provision – is due to start appearing in schools from 2023. Campus IT know that networking in the Kelvin Building needs major investment, and I believe that, while we cannot extract any promises, P&A is not too far down the list of schools to be worked on.

Norman