As a person living in the year 2012, I tend to have a question pop into my head about three seconds after I walk into any room: Can I get wireless internet in here?

If you also have this problem, and you’re a KU student, faculty member or staffer who travels a lot — especially to Europe — then the university has some good news for you.

KU has signed on to a service called Eduroam, which connects about 6,000 research and education institutions around the world. It allows anyone who works or studies at one of those institutions to use secure wireless networks at any of the others.

So if you’re a KU faculty member and happen to find yourself at, say, the University of Westminster in London, you can easily log on to the secure wireless network there the same way you’d log onto KU’s. Likewise, a visiting professor from another participating institution could log onto KU’s network.

This news had faculty members at a luncheon last week excited when KU Chief Information Officer Bob Lim delivered it to them, according to David Day, a spokesman for KU’s information technology office.

You can see on a map provided by Eduroam that KU is one of the first universities in the central part of the United States to get a connection up and running, and only the second in the Big 12 conference (the University of Texas is the other). About 80 institutions in the U.S. have signed on; the bulk of the 6,000 members are in Europe, where the effort began.

Just check out these instructions provided by KU IT, and you can cut down on your wireless-related anxiety.