Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) is excited to announce changes and improvements to two of its WiFi networks across Michigan Medicine in November.
First, Michigan Medicine is offering eduroam beginning November 9 across all of its buildings, including NCRC, the medical school, hospitals and clinics. eduroam (short for education roaming) is a dual band network that allows visitors from other institutions easy, secure WiFi access using their own credentials. Michigan Medicine joins the University of Michigan and more than 800 other U.S. schools and institutions and 100 countries as part of eduroam.
“This is something we have wanted to do for a long time, especially to support our researcher and learner communities. It brings us closer to functioning more like the rest of the University which is what our users should expect,” said Jack Kufahl, Chief Information Security Officer of Michigan Medicine.
eduroam is an external network, and U-M users can access eduroam using level-1 credentials. eduroam does not provide access to internal Michigan Medicine resources, such as internal websites.
Alongside the rollout of eduroam, HITS is also improving service on MWireless-UMHS, a WiFi network available in the medical school buildings. Similar to the campus MWireless network, it will be available as a single band 5.0 GHz connection only.
“At times users struggle with poor performance when their device picks up a 2.4 GHz connection,” said Nathan Haley, Network Architect. “Limiting the MWireless-UMHS network to a faster connection should consistently improve performance.”
While this change is welcome, it’s essential that the research community take note of the MWireless-UMHS network changes. Any research device connected to MWireless-UMHS that only supports a 2.4 GHz connection will need to move from the MWireless-UMHS network to the eduroam network by November 20 to avoid internet disruption. To streamline this move, HITS is offering both MWireless-UMHS and eduroam as dual band networks (2.4 and 5.0 GHz connections) between November 9-20. After November 23, MWireless-UMHS will be offered as a 5.0 GHz connection only.
“By offering a two-week window for users to make necessary changes, we hope to minimize any disruption to the important work happening at the medical school,” Haley said.