Open Access Info

Open Access

History

  • Federal Government’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program of 2009 expanded CEN’s scope to allow any CT organization, public and private, to connect
  • Grown to include over 40 members
  • Membership includes public and private non-profits, arts/science/culture exhibitors, theaters, entertainment venues, radio and television broadcasters, for-profit businesses, and on-net service providers

Included Features:

Features & Benefits

  • CEN provides full end-to-end Internet connectivity including last mile fiber to any organization with a CT address
  • Prospective members now have more ISP choice including dedicated, symmetrical fiber access with 1 Gbps + speed
  • CEN offers a cost recovery business model vs a for-profit model resulting in price reductions as network membership grows
  • CEN offers highly personalized service from its Hartford, CT based team
  • On-net service providers leverage the public infrastructure to create innovative market for additional member services including:
    • Voice
    • Disaster Recovery
    • Cloud Compute and Storage
    • Management and Monitoring
    • Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
  • CEN connects to major peering centers to reach multiple Tier 1 Service Providers thereby lowering costs and improving resiliency
  • CEN provides caching to major Content Delivery Networks (CDN) including Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, reducing latency, accelerating load times, and reducing bandwidth consumption
  • Public – Private partnerships flourish to provide members with on-net services at reduced cost via consortium contracts
  • Wide Area Networks are built for CT based organizations with geographically diverse locations

world circle with wires inter connected on the inside

Global Reach

With millions of access points and hundreds of participating institutions already, the eduroam system provides ready access to the Internet for learning. It alllows students, teachers, and professors to log in to participating networks with the user name and password from their school or college — no need to create a separate account for each network.

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Security

Connect with confidence and keep your wifi safe. Students know they can trust an eduroam access point, and institutions can provide education-specific access to learners, even those outside their school. Requests to join visiting networks are routed back to their home institution via a secure, encrypted session.

Use Cases:

learn

Learner

Students with eduroam configured at school can visit neighboring institutions and connect to a secure WiFi network. Just by opening their machine they can get on.

teach

Teacher

  • Student teachers visiting K-12 schools from colleges and universities can use their current credentials to connect anywhere.
  • Faculty visiting neighboring schools for professional development or continuing education credits.
people

Community

No more fumbling around for guest network credentials and losing time trying to figure out how to connect.

How to get started:

Institutions who want to get started with eduroam and join the community need to have a few things in place. If your learning institution (K-12 School, Library, Museum, Higher Ed) has the components below already in place, you may be just hours away from an eduroam launch.

  1. An agreement with CEN and InCommon.

  2. Compliant Infrastructure – Wireless Access Points that are 802.1x/802.11i compliant

  3. Identity Store – An authentication server (Active Directory, LDAP, Kerberos) and User active accounts (staff, faculty, students) RADIUS Server
  4. Server running RADIUS – and the ability for configurations made to the local network to allow it to route authentication requests

If you want to be an ‘eduroam’ friendly location to help facilitate guest access, you need the following:

  1. An agreement with CEN and /or InCommon
  2. Compliant Infrastructure – Wireless Access Points that are 802.1x/802.11i compliant

TO LEARN MORE:

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WHY CEN?

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QUALITY

CEN’s scalable, resilient network design offers an unmatched combination of performance attributes for speed, latency, reliability, and security.

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VALUE

CEN’s cost recovery model provides competitive pricing, custom tailored services, and larger feature sets as compared to other for-profit ISPs.

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SERVICE

CEN’s Connecticut based team backs its members with a 24/7/365 Network Operations Center (NOC) and access to senior technical staff for the most consistent, local, expert service available.