It’s a new year at Oberlin College, and the WiFi is on the fritz. Oberlin officially switched from ObieWifi to eduroam, the globally recognized go-to higher education internet service, in June 2024. During this time, the service has become reliable only in its unreliability. Put your palm to the sweet Wilder Bowl grasses and feel those communal vibrations — the chorus of thousands of students alternating between, “oh come on,” “my god,” and “not again!” 

I’ve made plenty of those exclamations myself, on phone and computer, whether in my East Hall dorm or walking around, trying to access a library article, or at the tail end of a class in Severance Hall, waiting desperately for my lab report to submit. I sigh, I mutter. I switch to data; I switch to ObieGuest; I turn on airplane mode. What I don’t do is get things done. To generalize my woes, the inability to get academic work done is the current most pressing concern. Oberlin students do, very much, want to be here and at work. This is one pesky roadblock. 

Third-year College student Zoë Holland shares my experience of WiFi frustration. 

“Because of the WiFi situation,” Holland wrote in a text, “sometimes I’m unable to use the EV CarShare app to unlock the car when I’m standing next to the door. WiFi sometimes just doesn’t work for minutes on end even when I’m in Mudd or my room.” 

Here we are reminded of our sleek, cutting-edge hopes — an environmental, Oberlin take on a taxi! But these lavish hopes can easily crumble because of a shaky foundation. So much of the Oberlin student experience is built online. Once you realize this, the WiFi issue reveals itself in full. We could all stand to spend less time on our phones or have less of our infrastructure based on a faulty network, but that’s the reality. It’s death by a thousand loading bars. 

Any Obie waiting out these internet-less stretches can be tentatively assured they’re not alone — not on campus, and not in the rest of the world. Checking the top posts about eduroam on X, formerly known as Twitter, reels in a nonstop stream of complaints. Of course the data is biased; a bitter user trapped with a frozen screen is more likely to pause and vent than someone whose computer is working fine. Still, the range of posts, in so many languages, is notable. One Portuguese user pitches a “Chappell roam” instead. A French post chooses a fake image of bloodied hands and a smashed computer to depict their attempt at logging on. University of New South Wales lecturer Neil Renic uses the site to posit, “if academics are so smart why can’t they connect to eduroam?”

The latter gets at the existential core of the issue. We know, obviously, as bright young citizens of a troubled globe, that WiFi connectivity is not the biggest issue. We also know this is a prestigious school with some of the best resources and opportunities available. So why isn’t the WiFi on that level? Such a situation brings up personal, oft college-heightened anxieties around individual control, the future of technology, and our institution’s capacity to keep up with the most simple of needs. It does all this, and it turns any given Mudd Center printer into just another hunk of metal. The issue is very big and stubbornly small. It’s certainly not going away.