Education and public WiFi: eduroam stays, every other device gets a personal WiFi key
Staff and students sit on EAP-TLS or Passpoint, consoles, displays and lab instruments on keys under an identity, and visitors and the public use the open network or OpenRoaming. One log across every building.
- Five-year Murray State deal
- University of New Brunswick on iPSK
- World's first city-wide OpenRoaming network
Education and public
Education and public: pick your estate
Every learner or citizen connected with the right protections, and the devices that eduroam and certificates leave out.
Higher education
eduroam keeps the people whose devices can run 802.1X. Everything that cannot, games hardware, smart TVs, speakers, lab instruments and building systems, gets a MAC-bound key on a VLAN of its own, issued under an identity so it leaves when the account does.Schools
A school's cast changes weekly: temporary staff arrive for a day and leavers must vanish without a ticket. Access follows the directory and a calendar date, not a shared password, and classroom displays and printers sit on keys of their own.Local government
A city network serves three audiences that share nothing: the public, who must connect in one tap, residents in a digital inclusion scheme, who need a key of their own, and civic devices, which share a lane with neither. OpenRoaming carries returning users, so the portal is for first contact.
Use cases
The problems that thread these estates
Move-in and move-out without password changes
One resident leaves, one key is revoked, and nobody else is disconnected.IoT and devices with no screen
A device with no screen or certificate still gets its own MAC-bound key and VLAN.Contractors and visitors
Access that ends on its date: a portal for visitors, a time-limited key for contractors.
FAQ
Questions IT leads ask
Do we need new access points?
No. Purple Access is a cloud overlay on the access points your campuses and sites already run: Cisco Meraki, HPE Aruba, Ruckus, Juniper Mist, Ubiquiti UniFi, Cambium, Extreme and Fortinet. Mixed estates are supported.
Where does eduroam fit?
Beside the three, as its own SSID. In education, eduroam makes it four. Open, secure and xPSK carry your visitors, staff, halls and devices, and eduroam keeps doing its roaming job.
Is xPSK one SSID or one per household, tenant or device?
One SSID. Every key on it has its own VLAN, policy and bandwidth limit, returned by RADIUS at authentication, and there is no per-SSID key ceiling. Adding a key never adds a beacon.
What does revoking one key do to everyone else?
Nothing. Each key is its own entry in RADIUS, bound to its device by MAC, so withdrawing one ends that device's access and leaves every other key connected. A live session is ended with RADIUS CoA on access points that support it.
Book a demo: we issue and revoke a key on a live network
Bring the list of what connects to your network. We issue a key, bind it to a device, place it on its VLAN and revoke it on a live network, on the access points you already own.
- Tell us what connectsYour SSIDs, your access points and the devices nobody wants to talk about.
- We issue a key and revoke it liveOne device, one key, its own VLAN, then switched off while you watch the log.
- You leave with the three-network planWhich of your groups sit on open, secure and xPSK, and what to pilot first.
Your design session
Your live key demo
A Purple network engineer runs the demo with you, on your kind of estate.