The University’s Information Technology Services (ITS) will retire the airwes Wi-Fi network in January 2022. ITS Director of User Services Erik Quimby announced the change in an all-campus email on Tuesday, Nov. 2, explaining that eduroam will become the preferred wireless network on campus.
“ITS recommends that all active students, faculty, and staff prepare for the change by signing into eduroam wifi on their devices this fall,” Quimby wrote in the all-campus email.
According to ITS Deputy Chief Information Officer Karen Warren, airwes and eduroam are the same wireless network under two different network names, also known as service set identifiers (SSIDs). Therefore, the retirement of airwes does not mean that ITS is actually removing anything from the wireless network.
“This is important because we are not reducing or removing anything,” Warren wrote in an email to The Argus. “We are simply removing the redundant SSID.”
Warren explained that ITS has been planning to retire airwes ever since the University implemented the eduroam network. The upcoming winter break will provide ITS enough time to conduct infrastructure maintenance before the network is retired in the spring semester.
“We could have just switched Airwes to Eduroam at the time, but we felt that would have been confusing and unnecessarily disruptive,” Warren wrote. “By offering both, we provided a long transition period. That period ended up much longer than expected because of the pandemic.”
Unlike airwes, eduroam is available at international research and education institutions around the world, allowing Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff to access the network when they go abroad or visit other campuses.
“Eduroam adds functionality that Airwes doesn’t have,” Warren wrote. “Eduroam is part of an international federation (eduroam.org) that allows our community to connect on any campus in the world that has implemented it…. This has already proven to be incredibly useful for those members of our community who study and research abroad as well as for students visiting people at other campuses. Once you have connected to Eduroam here, you connect everywhere it is available.”
Students, faculty, and staff should sign into Eduroam using their full Wesleyan email address, including the @wesleyan.edu. The wes-guest Wi-Fi network will remain available for guests on campus who do not have eduroam credentials.
Jiyu Shin can be reached at jshin01@wesleyan.edu.