Academic network of Serbia (AMRES) recognized a need to organize a training/workshop for IT staff of its member institutions which would cover wireless technology topics. The training is going to be organized in September 2011 within the GEANT3/NA3/T4 task “Campus Best Practice” and it is going to cover best practices in wireless networks. Four countries, with extensive experience in implementation of wireless solutions, are contributing to the agenda of the training.
AMRES member institutions have a lot of wireless equipment. Usually these are low cost, standalone solutions, employed to provide the Internet connectivity at places where the lacks of wired network are experienced. There are some rare cases where serious radio and coverage planning was performed previous to wireless infrastructure implementation, thus resulting in a few major WLAN installations in AMRES at the moment.
Interest in topics concerning wireless technology topics is increasing in AMRES as a result of popularization and spreading of the eduroam service during the year. Earlier this year, eduroam training was held resulting with increasing number of institutions connected to eduroam (at the moment about 15) and eduroam hostspots (20 in Serbia). The focus of eduroam training was on the service architecture, ways to join the service, as well as the FreeRADIUS server configuration, monitoring, logging and security incidents propagation.
During and after the eduroam training there were a lot of questions from AMRES IT staff beyond the scope of the training. Most of these questions were related to wireless infrastructure, AMRES recommendations for wireless solutions and protocols as well as solutions for common security issues in wireless networks. This indicated a need for an additional training/workshop and NA3/T4 wireless training is seen as complementary to the eduroam training available at AMRES Media Portal. It will be organized with the aim to answer actual questions and to cover the topics regarding best practices in wireless infrastructure deployment which are most important for AMRES.
Target group is network engineers working with deployment of wireless technology and eduroam service in AMRES member institutions.
The wireless training/workshop is going to be organized as part of the GEANT3 project within the NA3/T4 task "Campus Best Practices".