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Q: Will my home device work at MIT?

Answer

For information on Xfinity on Campus using a Roku device, see: Using a Roku Device with the Xfinity on Campus Service

Devices that make your life so much easier at home are not designed to work on institutional networks such as ours. Home devices are designed for very small networks. It’s not that we don’t want you to use these devices, it’s just that they don’t work.

Unless we specify which devices do work with some adjustments, assume your device will NOT work.

There is a potential workaround for wireless printers. Please note, IS&T does not support wireless printing in any capacity.

Here’s a possible workaround for Apple TV.

This article includes a website that will help determine if your device will work on MIT Secure: Which devices cannot connect to MIT SECURE?

A more technical answer is devices that use Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), (an implementation of the ZEROCONF protocol for device discovery on small networks) are not supported as this protocol is disabled on the wireless networks at MIT. While ZEROCONF and Bonjour work well on home or small business networks, they are not compatible with large enterprise networks, which can frequently have thousands of devices in the same wireless address space. ZEROCONF relies on multicast traffic to discover devices on the network, which exhibits crippling performance and load issues on large enterprise network implementations. Even if it were enabled on the network, results would be slow to return and potentially return lists of hundreds of devices to choose from.

IS&T Contributions

Documentation and information provided by IS&T staff members


Last Modified:

January 12, 2023

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