The Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS), the Data Processing Company of the Municipality of Porto Alegre (Procempa), and the the Brazilian National Research and Educational Network (RNP) sign this Friday, 9/26, the 2nd Amendment to the UFRGS/Procempa/RNP Agreement, which formalizes the availability of the eduroam service, that provides access to safe wireless network in the city of Porto Alegre for the academic community. The state capital will become the first city in Latin America to offer access to eduroam in public places for teachers and researchers, students and staff of the service user institutions. The ceremony will be held at the meeting hall of the Dean office, at UFRGS.   

The 15 locations that will initially have the service available are: Parque da Redenção, Avenida Ipiranga, Praça Quinze de Novembro, DEMHAB (Municipal Housing Department) at Avenida Princesa Isabel, Avenida Borges de Medeiros - SMOV and SPM (Department of Public Works and Transportation and Department of Planning), Parque Marinha do Brazil, Avenida Azenha (DMLU -  Department of Urban Cleaning), Public Market, Usina do Gasômetro, Parque Marinha do Brazil (SME - Municipal Secretary of Sports), Largo Glênio Peres, Largo dos Açorianos, Praça Izabel a Católica, Viaduto Dom Pedro I and Praça da Alfândega.

“We hope the availability of eduroam in public places in Porto Alegre becomes a case for other cities in Brazil with wireless network projects and services”, says Antônio Carlos Fernandes Nunes, RNP Service Management director. “Our goal is to capillarize this initiative, expanding the eduroam coverage”, he adds.

eduroam

Managed and operated in Brazil by RNP, the service offers free safe access to wireless internet to the global academic community and now has over a thousand access points in Brazil. As a result, Latin America has become the second region of the world with the greatest eduroam coverage, being only behind Europe, where the service has been designed.

This growth was helped in large part by the leadership of Brazil in the Europe Latin America e-Infrastructure for Collaborative Research Activities project (ELCIRA) on actions of deploying identity federations and dissemination of eduroam in Latin America, a project coordinated by the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA), with funding from the European Community. 

The advances made by ELCIRA enabled the formation of a Latin American Confederation of eduroam to discuss the inherent issues in the region, as well as referring them to the Global eduroam Governance Committee (GeGC), entity of which Brazil is a member since 2012, the year that eduroam was released in the country by RNP.

With a safe wi-fi network, the service allows users to connect to the internet from any location that has eduroam access points, being the authentication performed with the credentials of the user's home institution. Thus, it is only necessary that the institution is a user of the eduroam service and have it configured on its computer, mobile phone or tablet to automatically detect the wireless network. In Brazil, to be a service provider  the education and research institution only needs to be approved at the Federated Academic Community (CAFe). 

Application access detects the closest eduroam access points

To locate the nearest service access source, the eduroam Companion app offers Android and iOS users the locations of institutions authorized to use the service worldwide. Example: if a Dutch researcher is visiting the Usina do Gasômetro, he will be able to use the safe eduroam wi-fi network with his login and password for his university, automatically connecting on the phone.