Submitted by A. Worledge on Mon, 11/09/2023 - 17:00
UIS will decommission the UniOfCam SSID and ticket-based access service for visitors on Monday 8 January 2024.
Following consultation with institutions who participated in trials the UIS have chosen the best date and ensured that suitable alternative services are available to meet everyone’s needs.
What is changing
The UIS is decommissioning the UniOfCam SSID, which provides wifi access for:
- staff and students who log in each time they connect with their University account (formerly Raven) credentials
- visitors and guests who log in with a manually generated ticket.
Why we are making the change
Decommissioning these duplicated services will simplify the University’s wireless offering for users and improve the user experience. It will also remove the administrative burden of generating and giving out tickets from local teams, and reduce the number of underlying systems and technologies we need to maintain. The change also helps to improve network security. UniOfCam traffic isn’t encrypted between the client and the access point, whereas eduroam traffic is fully encrypted.
How it will affect users
Staff and students who use the UniOfCam SSID will need to connect to our eduroam service. If they have a personal device that can’t connect via eduroam because the device does not support 802.1x authentication, they can connect it to UniOfCam-IoT. In both cases, they won’t need to reauthenticate each time they connect, unlike when they are using the UniOfCam SSID, if they follow the set up instructions on the UIS website.
Visitors and guests will need to connect to UniOfCam-Guest, which supports self-registration via an email address or social media account (such as Facebook or LinkedIn). They will not be able to connect to eduroam unless they have credentials from another institution that also provides eduroam. Institutions can apply for a ‘Visitor CRSid’ for long-term guests, which would enable them to connect to eduroam, using the registration process for staff and academic visitors.
Future developments for the guest wifi service
The UIS are working on the following enhancements to the UniOfCam-Guest service:
- significantly increasing the connection speed to the Internet Service Provider
- deploying Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (also known as "Wi-Fi Certified Enhanced Open") – a method of encrypting traffic between the access point and the client device on ‘open’ style guest networks.
If you have any concerns or queries, please email helpdesk@hsps.cam.ac.uk