Telenet and KU Leuven share WiFi hotspots

Telenet and KU Leuven have signed an agreement to give their users access to each other’s Wi-Fi hotspots. Students and employees of KU Leuven can use Telenet hotspots free of charge and subscribers of the cable company vice versa.

There are currently more than 150 hotspots on the Leuven and Kortrijk campuses, reports the Catholic University of Leuven. However, Telenet has many more hotspots because customers’ cable modems often also offer internet access via WiFi as ‘home spots’. According to Telenet, there are approximately 1.2 million such Wi-Fi hotspots in the air in Flanders, along with two thousand regular hotspots of the cable operator in crowded areas.

The eap authentication protocol is used to log in to Telenet’s WiFi hotspots. As a result, a customer only needs to log in once and can move between Telenet hotspots without logging in again. This mechanism will also be used for the connection to the Wi-Fi networks of KU Leuven. Telenet subscribers therefore log in to the KU Leuven networks without further authentication, while the 40,000 students and 10,000 employees of the university have to enter their KU Leuven username and password.