Connecting your laptop / wifi device to the network

Laptops and other wifi devices should generally use one of the following wireless networks:

  • eduroam wireless network (recommended for mobile phones and laptops that just need an internet connection) - common across many european universities and hence a good choice for both people from other Oxford departments (use your university remote access account details, i.e. [SSO Username (in lower case)]@OX.AC.UK) as well as those already setup for eduroam from other universities. For more information on eduroam, including setup instructions for various OSes, see https://help.it.ox.ac.uk/how-to-connect-to-eduroam.
  • The Cloud wireless network for public access (also found in many other public places such as stations, restaurants, events spaces etc). Can be used by anyone and hence useful if a person does not have an eduroam account. When you connect to the network if you open a browser it should take you to a portal page to register / connect.
  • MATHS wireless network (recommended if you need to use departmental services like printing or file sharing; this network is intended only for laptops and not for phones/tablets). You will need to authenticate to the network using your Maths user account.
  • OWL - Oxford Wireless LAN. Useful for those visiting the university in other departments where this is used who are also then occasionally in a maths building (generally a legacy system now that may be discontinued in the future

To connect to eduroam or MATHS wifi settings one typically needs to:

  • use WPA2 Enterprise as the connection type
  • use PEAP with MSCHAPv2 authentication
  • enter username and password (SSO remote access account for eduroam, normal maths account for MATHS)
  • accept any certificates

For The Cloud open a web browser and it should take you to the cloud portal to register if you do not already have a free account for the service.

 

Note if you configure your device to be able to connect to more than one of these available networks when in the building then this can result in your device making inappropriate decisions at times and dropping one network connection and reconnecting via another - symptoms of this are dropped video calls or screen freezes for short periods. To avoid this you should remove the auto-join wifi setting from all but one of the configured connections - e.g. if you have eduroam configured for general use then keep that set with auto-join, but if you also configure MATHS to connect to occasionally if you need to print more easily then remove auto-join from that. Provided you have only one auto-join configured network in place the device should then only switch networks away from the auto-join one when you explicitly ask it to do so and so you will have a more reliable connection. This problem is most often see on Apple Macbook devices!

 

If you experience issues with the wifi, then as with any other department IT issue, please report them to IT support who can then investigate. Wifi speeds will vary around the building with the fastest seen at about 300Mbps (dependent on particular device, network standards, access point features and location, and wifi network SSID connected to).

Unmanaged subnet restrictions

Any personal machine connected to the MATHS network is considered untrusted and as such may only be connected to a separate subnet using DHCP (see the IT policy). 

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Last updated on 18 Jan 2023 13:47.