Importance of Enforcing Correct Usernames on eduroam

On a recent job there were frequent complaints from users that were unable to connect to eduroam when roaming at other universities. (eduroam for those who don't know about it is one of the great wonders of the modern world. It is a federated Wi-Fi network around the world for the international research and education community.) The reason usually because they are authenticating without using a correct username format recognised by the eduroam proxies.

In order for authentications to be routed correctly from a visited location to the home institution the domain suffix @institution.ac.uk is used to route the user authentication request back to the correct location. It is analogous to dialling a local phone number within a town but needing to add the STD code to dial a phone number in a different town.

At some point in the past this particular university had decided to be helpful for their users and allow them to authenticate using just the username or DOMAIN\username. The problem this has created is that most people have now setup their eduroam connection in this way so that when they roam it doesn't work and we have no way of seeing this as the national proxies don't know they are our users.

As a result in comparison with other UK universities UoX was only seeing a fraction of the roaming connections.

Looking at the breakdown of authentications on Clearpass it could be seen only 14% of the local authentications were to eduroam in a format that would work when roaming. UoX WiFi was another legacy 802.1X network that served no longer served any purpose. So for the users making 77% of the Wi-Fi connections on campus would have issues when roaming at other universities and eduroam locations. No wonder the roaming statistics are so small.

So in conclusion, it is important to consider what customer service actually means. Is it really helping them to be able connect locally a few seconds more quickly but then that prevents them for roaming without further issues.