eduroam(UK) Announcement of Change of Name of the Janet Roaming Service to eduroam(UK)

This advisory is relevant to all participants in the UK providing the eduroam federated service historically known as the Janet Roaming Service. Organisations are requested to review their service-related web material.

9/01/2013

Background

Janet provides governance of the UK eduroam federation and operates the national UK RADIUS infrastructure and support services underpinning eduroam in the UK. Janet is a member of the European eduroam confederation, which enables UK participants to benefit from worldwide access to eduroam and we are active and innovative participants in the Géant JRA3 and SRA3 groups which steer eduroam in Europe.

Reflecting the unique characteristics of the UK academic community, Janet is one of the leaders in the evolution of eduroam (which is an ongoing process, particularly in the UK) and was the first European country to develop a comprehensive technical service specification, which subsequently formed the basis for the wider European confederation technical specification.

When Janet originally introduced eduroam, due to the distinctive nature of the service in the UK it was launched under the brand of ‘JANET Roaming’ and the ‘JANET Roaming Service’ (JRS) - by which it has been generally known in the IT Services community by implementers and service administrators. However, end-users at organisations have of course always been presented with the ‘eduroam’ service name and SSID and this is the name by which the service is most widely known to our user base and to users internationally. Nevertheless the JANET Roaming name persists throughout large sections of the community and was, until relatively recently, the term by which we referred to the UK eduroam federation and Janet’s eduroam technical support and RADIUS proxy infrastructure.

Branding change

In order to remove brand confusion we have discontinued use of ‘JANET Roaming’ and instead have introduced the ‘eduroam(UK)’ brand to describe eduroam in the UK, as governed and supported by Janet and bound by the UK technical specification and rules of membership. This follows the established international trend for the use of nation-specific brand names, although there is no standard format for these. For clarification, the parent brand ‘eduroam’ represents the European confederation and is the name of the ubiquitous service provided to end-users; it is of course also the name of the network (SSID) to which users connect.

How does this affect participating organisations?

The above brand name change means that whilst there are no operational changes that need to be made by participating organisations in the UK, references to Janet Roaming and JRS should be removed from promotional and instructional material and eduroam service information web sites. This also includes removal of the old JANET Roaming eduroam logo. There is no eduroam(UK) replacement. The standard 'eduroam' logo should be used instead http://www.eduroam.org/?p=media&s=logo. This change does not affect our end users.

Nb. The Janet brand name has also been modified; references to ‘JANET’ should be changed to ‘Janet’.

Ed Wincott
eduroam(UK Service Manager
09/01/13