The mailing list for users of the eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool (CAT)

[Stefan Winter <stefan.winter AT restena.lu>]

Hello all,

as you may be aware already, with the upcoming CAT 1.1 release we'll
introduce support for Hotspot 2.0 / Passpoint for every device where we
possibly can. Which equals "Apple" right now :-)

Once 1.1 is in production, you'll thus get installers for iOS and OS X
with Passpoint and the eduroam Consortium OI "for free" (well, in fact
your users will be asked for the username/password for this passpoint
config as if it was yet-another-SSID, so it comes at a marginal cost
during installation time).

(Oh, and you can add additional Consortium OIs to install if you have any)

We'll launch an "alpha1" release of CAT later this week, and I'd like to
ask for opinions and some advice regarding our support for this before
we go into beta. So what you find attached is a screenshot of an
installed CAT 1.1 iOS profile generated from current trunk to illustrate
my questions below.

First of all, the names of the WiFi settings usually equal the SSID name
- in the example, you see "SSID eduroam" and "SSID eduroam-school" in my
test case.

Since HS20/PP does not use the notion of SSID, the question is of course
how to present these network settings to the user. For the time being, I
chose

"Hotspot 2.0 Settings"

which is accurate, but probably not easy to understand for end users.
It's free-text, so suggestions for "anything" are welcome for renaming.
In particular, "Hotspot 2.0" is the more techy term from Wi-Fi Alliance,
end-user merketing is much more under the "Passpoint" brand. Also, do we
(or do we not) want the name "eduroam" to appear there? As a first shot
to get thoughts going:

"eduroam: Passpoint Configuration" or just "eduroam: Passpoint"

may look easier to the eyes of innocent end users?

One thing I don't know how to change (do you?) and I've never seen any
differently is the fine-print in the profile below the bold heading. In
my example, you see:

education.lu-ABCDEF-WHAT-A-LONG-UUID-ARGH

That is unfortunately also what Apple shows to the user during
installation time ("Please enter your username for ..............").

I don't see any way of changing that. The UUID part is apparently made
up by the device - it's NOT in the profile. The "education.lu" part of
it is the "Operator Domain Name" field and really better should be the
actual realm of the profile; the field's content is used to distinguish
between "home" and "roaming" Hotspots.

I've verified that even the glossy-shiny testcase deployment at MWC2014
used an iOS profile with a similarly ridiculous UI; I'm almost sure that
those guys would have made it look better if there was a way at all.

Lastly, you can see from the screenshot that stuff actually /works/ :-)
On the top-left, you see that I am connected to a network called
"HS20TEST" which is not configured at all; the AP simply emits the
eduroam HS20 Consortium OI and that's enough to make iOS realise that it
can connect using the profile's configured eduroam passpoint credentials.

Ah, and finally you also see the unrelated new CAT 1.1 feature of
"delete bootstrap captive SSID"; which I currently call UI-wise
"Disabled WiFi Network" (on iOS / OS X, it is not possible to *delete*
an SSID from a profile; but you can add the SSID and mark it as "don't
automatically connect" which is almost as good). If you have thoughts
about naming for that part of the config, don't be shy :-)

Greetings,

Stefan Winter

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