Ohio State is switching all Wi-Fi users from osuwireless to eduroam by the summer of 2024. Credit: Caleb Blake | Photo Editor
There’s a new network in town.
By the summer of 2024, the university is hoping to have all users away from the current osuwireless network and on eduroam, an international Wi-Fi service made for universities or research partners. This will help resolve connectivity issues and provide a network usable at other campuses, Ryan Holland, the director for enterprise networking at the Office of Technology and Digital Innovation, said.
“Eduroam is in 100 different countries and even places like Columbus State, Denison University, Ohio University and all these different locations that are nearby,” Holland said. “You can go there and your device will automatically connect. So even though you’re not at Ohio State, you can go anywhere that eduroam is present across the globe, and you will securely connect.”
Holland said the rollout will provide students with an easier experience when connecting to Wi-Fi. On the original osuwireless service, they were seeing 5 million authentication failures a day when people would attempt to log on.
Due to frequent password changes, it was difficult for students to connect to the network, Holland said.
“If the user didn’t actually go and update every one of their devices [with a new password change], you’d start to see these failures. So we knew that we wanted to unstitch the user’s password from their network connectivity,” Holland said. “ So when we look at that and we looked at what we already offered, eduroam was already on campus and it provides secure connectivity to Wi-Fi worldwide.”
Students only have to connect to eduroam one time. Holland said the login process can all be done through the Ohio State Wi-Fi website.
Sydney Kuehn, communications strategist for the Office of Technology and Digital Innovation, said the university is spreading the word about this change across campus.
“We’ve been running some ads through social media, and we are also doing bus signage. That’s actually where we have seen a lot of our clicks come through. There is a QR code running on some bus signage that takes you right to the wireless.osu.edu page to configure your device,” Kuehn said.
Students will have access to the eduroam network for five years. When a student logs in, their device will enroll in a five-year certificate, allowing for a one-and-done setup.
Holland said as long as someone is affiliated with the university, they will have continual access.
Holland said the department is already seeing large improvements from the original metrics. Both networks are still functional until the summer goal of switching all users over.
“When our users are failing to authenticate to the network, we know that that’s a horrible experience. So that metric that we had of the number of authentication failures, we have already at the beginning of the semester seen a 50 percent reduction in those failures,” Holland said. “And we’ll continue to see those improvements as we get closer and closer to sunsetting osuwireless.”
