Chromecast, Google Home and Google Nest devices don't support these kind of Wifi systems, known as captive portals, that require you to login first to be able to access the internet. There are a couple of possible solutions for this:
- Although unsupported by Google, you can try to use a phone or tablet as a Wifi hotspot. However, this will then use your mobile data plan, which could be expensive for you depending on the data plan you have with your carrier. Note you will need 2 devices to set this up.
- Turn on the Wifi hotspot feature on a phone or tablet. If you're not sure how to do this, refer to the manufacturer's support website.
- Connect a second phone or tablet to that Wifi hotspot.
- You can then use that second phone or tablet to setup your device and connect it to the Wifi hotspot on the first phone or tablet.
- If you're able to use a wired network connection instead, you could invest in your own cheap router and connect your devices to that router instead.
You may have seen other troubleshooting guides online that advise registering your MAC address with whoever manages the Wifi to whitelist the device. This may not work on some Wifi networks, as the administrator may have enabled a security feature called client isolation, which prevents different devices from communicating with each other (i.e. your phone communicating with your device).
Moreover, Chromecast with Google TV uses something called MAC randomisation, which is a privacy feature. This makes it significantly harder to track devices based on their MAC address (especially when connecting to public and shared Wifi networks).
Unfortunately, this really is not compatible with captive portal Wifi networks. If your university does have a process to register/whitelist devices, the only way to disable the MAC randomisation feature and share the true MAC address would require your university to disable restrictions for you to be able to connect to the Wifi network in the first place to disable the MAC randomisation feature. That is something I suspect they are highly unlikely to do for security reasons.
