Case Study

Public - commercial collaboration provides eduroam®
roaming access service in downtown Tokyo
In March 2010, a collaborative experimental service waslaunched, adding eduroam to commercial hotspots incafés, convention centres and large shops in downtown
Tokyo, Japan. By July, Wi-Fi stations on power poles
were also making the secure, roaming access service
available on the streets. The Japanese National Instituteof Informatics (NII) and livedoor, a Japanese provider ofcommercial WLAN services, worked together to create
this service for students and researchers in the region. InMarch 2011, livedoor announced that the experiment
was over and it would support eduroam as a regularservice.
NII is Japan’s national operative body for eduroam.
An NII committee of representatives from eightleading national universities and a major researchorganisation is in charge of inter-university
federation in Japan, and these organisations also
promote eduroam.
In 2009, NII contacted Internet Service
Providers and carriers to explore possible
collaboration on eduroam. In October that year,
livedoor was the first ISP that agreed to providing
eduroam via commercial hotspots. In November the firstmeeting was held. The service began as a collaborative
experiment, with 130 indoor hotspots in early March.
By July, 2,200 more hotspots were eduroam ready, onpower poles, making eduroam available on the streets
within the loop of the JR Yamanote rail line. In future,
livedoor plans to add eduroam hotspots in otherJapanese cities.

Benefits for the commercial partner
When livedoor Co.,Ltd. first heard about eduroam, it
was designing its public wireless service to cater for thegrowing smartphone market – such as iPhone3G, iPad,Android, BlackBerry etc. – and saw academic institutions
and college students as key markets for the smartphone
as well as the main beneficiaries of a public wirelessservice.
livedoor is an Internet Service Provider whose
main business is to provide ‘total solution’ packages
that include both network and Wi-Fi infrastructures,
benefiting from the installation and service fees.
Previously, deploying commercial hotspots in universities
was not popular, but livedoor worked with four
universities to install access points and networks on
campus, rather than constructing hotspot infrastructure
independent of the campus LAN (Local Area Network).
As the universities and institutions are responsible forthe cost of installation and Internet acccess, setting up
the eduroam hotspots is extremely cost effective for® eduroam is a registered trademark of TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association

livedoor and gains the company competitive advantage:in March 2011, livedoor decided to accelerate thispart of its business. The universities also benefit: byoutsourcing the network system they can reduce thenetwork management / maintenance effort while paying
the same or less money, and technical knowledge is nolonger required.
Another part of livedoor’s business is to manage aportal site with a lot of web content. The company sees
its infrastructures as a way of generating more traffic: byinstalling hotspots in campuses, it aimed to encourage
the use of its web portal by the many students and otherpeople related to universities and institutions, and to
gain understanding about the use of its services. Since
installing campus hotspots, livedoor has seen an
increased profit for its Internet-access service.

Why put eduroam®
on the streets?
livedoor decided to expand its eduroam provisionfrom academic and research institutions to publicareas in Tokyo because this would enlarge theopportunities for users to access the company’sother content and services. And for a company thathas been operating a public wireless service andgaining experience since 2005, and which enjoyed thecooperation of NII on this venture, there were no
problems in scaling the service across so many
access points.

Akiteru Shirakura
Manager, Core NetWork Group, Network Division,
livedoor Co.,Ltd., Tokyo.
“We support eduroam because we thought itwould have a positive impact on our business,
as well as being beneficial for researchers andstudents to have mobile access to the Internet.”

Who is using eduroam in Japan?
How eduroam is gaining groundin Japan
Tohoku University introduced eduroam in Japan in2006, and has been in charge of the eduroam JP
operation since then, as a member of the National
Institute of Informatics committee that overseesinter-university federation within the country.
As a member of staff at Tohoku University witha broad interest in information sciences, and as a
Visiting Associate Professor at NII, Dr. Hideaki Goto
“works for eduroam in NII, virtually”. It was he who first
introduced livedoor to eduroam and who worked withthe company to get the experimental service under way.

The number of eduroam users in Tokyo is still
relatively small, but has been increasing since July 2010
according to livedoor: although the company is stillcollecting information, it feels that there has been an
increase in traffic to its web portal and that there havebeen growing numbers of users at the universities. It
plans to use the statistics to encourage advertising on
its website. So far, the majority of users are European
research staff who are working in Japanese institutions.
Dr. Hideaki Goto uses eduroam every time hevisits Tokyo, keeping up with work and study byaccessing email and the Internet while commuting. He
has also used the service while travelling outside Japan,in Europe, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

® eduroam is a registered trademark of TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association

The majority though are using the service locally, andless frequently. But they share similar views about thebenefits of the service:
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once installed, eduroam is easy to use as mobiledevices connect to it automatically;
eduroam expands the number of providers tochoose from;it broadens the range of places where users canaccess the network;
it does this free of charge to the user;
since Japanese commercial services do not provide
fixed rates for roaming abroad, eduroam is also
useful in other countries.

eduroam® around the world
eduroam is a fast growing, global service that waspioneered by the European research and education
networking community. It is available at thousandsof participating organisations in Europe, Canada,
the USA, Australia, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
New Zealand and Japan, among other places, andprovides roaming connectivity to users allowing
them to be truly part of the international researchand education community.
The European eduroam service is a large-scalecollaboration between hundreds of institutions, themajority of which own and operate the service’sinfrastructure. The national and pan-European
coordination of this infrastructure is undertakenby the National Roaming Operators (NROs) and an
eduroam Operational Team that is funded by theGÉANT project, which is co-funded by Europe’s
National Research and Education Networkingorganisations(NRENs)andbytheEuropeanCommission.

For more information on eduroam,participating institutions and NROs, visit:www.eduroam.org

Professor Hideaki Goto
Associate Professor - Cyberscience Center, Tohoku
University, Sendai (350 km from Tokyo); Visiting
Associate Professor - NII.
Virtually expanding the university campuses“3G data communication is very slow andexpensive. I was using a commercial Wi-Fi service at
my personal expense even for work because it is much
more convenient, except the location limitation.
eduroam has provided me with free Wi-Fi access andadded some new places where I can use Wi-Fi.”“From the professor’s points of view, we canencourage students to use the net for studying
since eduroam is free. Although commercial Wi-Fi
has become very cheap (3 euro/month) in Japan,
it is almost impossible to ask students to make acontract or to ask universities to pay for professors’and students’ use abroad. eduroam has the potential
to provide a (technically) free Wi-Fi service and tovirtually expand the university campuses.”® eduroam is a registered trademark of TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association