This year, Critic Te Ārohi has noticed a spike in online grumbling about the University Wi-Fi, eduroam. Students have taken to forums (such as Castle26 and UoO Confessions – our favourite unofficial channels) in droves to air their grievances, which mostly boil down to this: the internet is either painfully slow, randomly disconnecting, or straight up refusing to exist in certain corners of campus. Tired of watching this digital despair unfold with no apparent resolution, Critic decided to dig deeper and figure out if there are really issues with eduroam.
After further discussions with students, Critic was able to pull out some specific examples of the Wi-Fi situation. Many described being repeatedly kicked off the network, with Lucy* describing that they “get logged off the Wi-Fi almost everyday”, which drove them “insane”. Others complained of inconsistent coverage across campus, particularly in study spaces like the Central Library, while some reported that the Wi-Fi would not work on certain devices at all. Eduroam was “bloody annoying and inconsistent”, according to Jonathan. With Wi-Fi being key to the increasingly digitalised educational infrastructure, Chris* complained of having their ability to attend lectures being interfered with. “I missed my class because I couldn’t confirm my timetable.”
In a poll on the Critic Instagram story (@criticmag, check us out) 845 of our followers tapped in to tell us if they thought Wi-Fi was worse on campus this year. 85% thought “yeah”, 3% thought “nah” and 13% reckoned they hadn’t noticed a change. Despite this, the University of Otago’s Chief Digital Officer, Steven Turnbull, indicated that the University was not currently aware of any widespread Wi-Fi issues. He also noted that the number of complaints about the Wi-Fi is actually lower than expected for this time of year.
“At present, there are only 32 open tickets related across all staff, students and visitors. Seventeen of these are related to UniFlats, reporting limited coverage in most cases.” Shoutout UniFlats – over there suffering in silence. When reviewing all Wi-Fi related reports, Steve and his team had only identified a pattern of issues that affected UniFlats specifically, and were not observed across the rest of campus. “Our networking team is actively investigating the UniFlats cases to understand the cause and implement solutions,” he assured. The only problems that had been identified outside of the UniFlats debacle were some “Apple device specific connectivity issues” in the Central Library, which they were also working to address.
For some context about why everyone might be deciding to kick off about the Wi-Fi all of a sudden, the University encouraged students to join eduroam instead of the network UO Wi-Fi last year. When asked what prompted the transition away from UO Wi-Fi, Steve explained that the network was "essentially still there”, just with a new name, and eduroam is not a new provider. For anyone reading this from UniFlats and feeling curious about the cause of connectivity issues, Steve explained that UniFlats used to be served by an old One NZ system that needed to be retired over Christmas, which meant the University assumed responsibility over the system instead. While this is an ongoing issue, it isn’t an option to revert back. “Eduroam has been around for a very long time, and is working successfully in all other parts of the campus, so there is no plan to revert to the old network.”
Overall, despite how students personally feel about eduroam’s performance, the University seems unaware of any Wi-Fi issues occurring consistently across campus. The University is encouraging students to report any issues with connecting to the Wi-Fi to AskOtago, so that ongoing problems are at least being logged somewhere official.
*Names changed
