In some countries, Internet access via eduroam is also available at other locations than the participating institutions, e.g. in libraries, public buildings, railway stations, city centres and airports.

[1][2] The eduroam initiative started in 2002 when during the preparations for the creation of TERENA's task force TF-Mobility, Klaas Wierenga of SURFnet shared the idea of combining a RADIUS-based infrastructure with IEEE 802.1X technology to provide roaming network access across research and education networks.

[3] Initially, the service was joined by institutions in the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Portugal, Croatia and the United Kingdom.

[5] Since 2004, the European Union co-funded further research and development work related to the eduroam service through the GN2[6] and GN3[7] projects.

[10] In Canada, eduroam started as an initiative of the University of British Columbia, which was later taken over by CANARIE as a service of its Canadian Access Federation.

[11] In the United States, eduroam was initially a pilot project between the National Science Foundation and the University of Tennessee (UTK).

[12] AnyRoam LLC, a private company, was formed by former UTK staff to serve as an Internet2 active corporate member administering the top-level servers.

As a consequence, eduroam is deployed in the following countries: In addition, three NRENs that are associate members of the consortium of the GN3 project without voting rights joined the European eduroam confederation; they represent Belarus (UIIP), Moldova (RENAM) and Russia (Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

eduroam is deployed in the following countries and economies: The Asia-Pacific top-level RADIUS servers are operated by AARNet and by the University of Hong Kong.