Description of Usage Graphs

The purpose of the usage graphs is to give an indication of how heavily the eduroam service is being used by Irish roaming users and by visitors to Ireland. There are several means of measuring this, these graphs use the numbers of authentications as their metric.

The graphs show numbers of authentications per IdP (a site facilitating eduroam use by their roaming users) and per SP (a site providing WiFi to visiting eduroam users). There are some things to be aware of when analysing the graphs:

• The number of authentications does not necessarily directly correspond to the number of roaming users, nor to the number of mobile devices, using eduroam - a mobile device might (re-)authenticate several times during a single WiFi "session", and of course the same user may be using eduroam simultaneously from more than one mobile device, all of which count as multiple authentications in the graphs.
• Quite often when a mobile device fails to successfully authenticate it is as a result of a configuration issue on the mobile device itself (incorrect configuration option selected, mis-typed username, mis-typed password, etc.). A mobile device may enter a cycle of repeatedly trying, and failing, to authenticate in such a scenario. As a result, authentication failures are often disproportionately represented in the graphs as a single misbehaving device can generate a substantial number of failures in a short space of time.
• Authentication is just the first of several steps required to achieve a usable WiFi network connection, so a successful authentication by an eduroam user does not guarantee that they obtained Internet connectivity. Any of a number of local network issues, DHCP problems for example, can still prevent a mobile device from successfully connecting to the WiFi network at the visited site.
• The graphs update once per hour.

The aggregated graphs show the sum of authentications across all Irish eduroam IdP's and SP's, while the numbers for individual sites are shown in dedicated graphs per site.

Successful authentication counts are shown in green, failed authentications are represented by red.