Students face connectivity problems with campus Wi-Fi network eduroam

Internet quality on NC State’s campus has become an issue among students as the eduroam network continues having connectivity trouble. 

Anina Parker, second-year studying political science, said she has experienced network issues with eduroam on several occasions, saying it frequently disconnects from her computer. 

“It will go in and out, and I will try everything to get it to work, but it just doesn't,” Parker said.

Greg James, director of Network Services of Communication Technologies, said it does not appear to be a widespread connectivity issue that the Office of Information Technology has observed or that students have reported.

“In general, our bandwidth is more than adequate for anything that we should be doing via Wi-Fi,” James said. “There could potentially be areas where there’s a lot of devices trying to connect to a singular [access point], but there does not appear to be a systemic problem that we’ve seen.” 

James said there have been six Wi-Fi outages between eduroam and other wireless networks since the beginning of the academic year. 

“Those outages lasted from a few minutes to several hours, and they have been from various unique causes,” James said. “One time one of our controllers rebooted. It just happened. There wasn’t any human intervention.” 

Aside from the outages, students continue to have difficulties connecting to the network, which has led them to resort to using unprotected and unencrypted networks such as NCSU and NCSUguest. Anastasia Katsiada, a third-year studying political science, said this is what she does when she has a hard time connecting to eduroam.

Emma Mori, a first-year in exploratory studies, said the issue with eduroam occurs nearly every day, although it generally just takes a minute or two before she is able to reconnect. She said she also sees other students struggling to connect with eduroam on social media.

“I know a lot of people have issues, and then I see on the NCSU [Snapchat] page that a bunch of people are like, ‘Why is the internet not working?’ and that happens probably at least once a week,” Mori said. 

Parker said the Office of Information Technology needs to work on tackling this issue, especially considering how an unreliable internet connection can result in a faulty grade for an online homework or test submission.

“I think that [the Office of Information Technology] should continue to work on it so that students don't have the added stress of not being able to connect to the internet on top of assignment due dates because everything is online now,” Parker said. 

James said it’s hard for the Office of Information Technology to say what is causing connectivity issues because there haven’t been any reports on it. He said it is important for students to contact the office whenever they are experiencing issues with eduroam so the office can be aware of a problem as it comes up.

“It’s very important that the students experiencing these issues of connectivity, that they reach out to the help desk,” James said. “But if we don’t know about them on an individual basis, it’s hard for us to determine if there’s something wrong with the system itself.” 

Students, faculty and staff experiencing IT issues should report to the Office of Information Technology Help Desk, by visiting help.ncsu.edu or calling 919-515-HELP (4357).