Revealed: These are the top 10 unis officially spending the most money on WiFi

There’s nothing worse than waking up early to get a seat in the library and opening your laptop to a dodgy WiFi connection. Your documents won’t load, Google won’t search, and worst of all… you forgot to download your fave Spotify playlist. Horrifying. The simple fact that Eduroam is giving me anger issues is a huge problem.

WiFi issues actually make up the biggest amount of complaints at UK universities, which probably means that your uni isn’t spending enough on it. To be fair, it is pretty expensive and annoying (try living in a house of six students). Over half of UK students have credited reliable WiFi with significantly improving their academic life and enhancing their campus experience. Fair enough.

So, what about the students that literally never experience a rubbish connection? New research found by experts at Independent Advisor Broadband Deals has revealed how much each uni spends on WiFi per year, and we’ve got the top 10 list. I’ll warn you, these are some whopping numbers.

The top 10 unis spending most on WiFi have an average yearly investment of £960,000. Shockingly, the average WiFi spend of all unis across the UK is a whopping 90 per cent less than this figure, at £86,000 a year – that’s just £4.55 per student. My daily study coffee is more expensive than that (don’t tell my mum this).

The University of Glasgow boasts the highest WiFi spend of all UK unis

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The University of Glasgow easily takes the top spot with an annual spend of £8.2 million on WiFi. Glasgow’s insane investment in broadband connects 32,000 students to an advanced network – why didn’t anyone tell me this before UCAS applications? The uni’s huge spend equates to £252.60 for each student per year, over 55 times more than the UK uni average of £4.55 per student for WiFi investment!

Unsurprisingly, Queen Mary University of London ranks third – you need a huge investment to even get signal in London. Queen Mary spends a yearly £1.6 million on WiFi for 26,000 students, with the highest connectivity speeds out of the top 10 unis spending the most on broadband. Who knew uni WiFi had such a big behind the scenes? No, you can’t join my hotspot.

Here is the full list of universities that spend the highest annual amount on WiFi in the UK, in view of the number of students:

10. Buckinghamshire New University – £375,000

9. University of Bath – £500,000

8. Kingston University – £550,000

7. Northumbria University – £1,058,170

6. University St Andrews – £500,000

5. University of Brighton – £920,000

4. University of Huddersfield – £1,000,000

3. Queen Mary University Of London – £1,600,000

2. University of Kent – £1,200,000

1. University of Glasgow – £8,200,000

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