Klaas Wierenga was recognized by the Internet Society as a person who contributed to the development and improvement of the Internet worldwide.
On September 27th, at a ceremony in Costa Rica, eduroam inventor Klaas Wierenga was inducted into the Internet Society's Internet Hall of Fame. He thus joins the likes of Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux) or Vint Cerf and Jon Postel (inventors of the modern internet).
It was almost 20 years ago, while working at SURFnet (the Dutch national research and education network), that Klaas imagined a solution that would allow a single login across all Dutch universities. “I was frustrated with the online access issues while traveling around universities in my country, when we all work together,” he told Connect, the GÉANT magazine: “That's when I started looking at emerging technologies that could solve these problems.”
As a result, Klaas Wierenga began working with Paul Dekkers to develop a concept that would become eduroam. After a pilot program in the Netherlands, GÉANT adopted the technology in 2003, with Portugal being one of the six pioneering countries.. Today, the network is available in 101 countries, with a total number of authentications exceeding 4.3 billion. Present in teaching and research institutions around the world, has around 30 thousand hotspots around the world.
"The best part is that all universities create infrastructure and make it available to the community. This way, everyone benefits," emphasizes Wierenga, concluding: "Eduroam was made possible by the work of hundreds, and now thousands, of people who believe in its idea and the value of working together. This is the true power of the global education and research community."
