Hosting free WiFi

waht

Is it legal to host free WiFi access? Especially in places like a cafe if you owned one. Or does one have to pay some additional royalties?

Poop-Loops

I think you need a "commercial package" from your ISP if you plan to make money off of using it. I'd contact them to make sure, in case they decide to sue you or something.

binzing

Of course it is! Just set up your router, and make your network public. But do, for your own sake, restrict access to your computers on the network.

Evo

Of course you can provide free WiFi. You will have to pay for the internet access, if you decide to let your customers access it for no charge from you, that's your decision. A lot of places offer it as a perk (they recoup the charges by increasing costs of other services, food, etc...). There is no free lunch.

Mk

The only thing that might scare you away, is that the MPAA and RIAA sue whoever is paying for the internet connection, not the perpetrator of copyright infringement.

Chi Meson

Unless you encrypt your system, you are hosting free WiFi. At least all my neighbors are!

Moonbear

Several of my neighbors do too. I appreciate their generosity when I need to test whether I'm having a cable outage or network problem.

~christina~

won't they know though?

Chi Meson

You would be able to detect a drop in your bandwidth if you were streaming video, perhaps. But if you are just, say, posting in some dumb forum, you'd never see the difference. There might be a danger if all my neighbors tapped into my signal at the same time, but all of them already have their own wireless connection.

I just checked, I'm getting nine signals (including my own) and only two are encrypted.

Moonbear

If they aren't smart enough to put a password on their router (or even change the name from the generic "linksys" ID), I doubt they have a clue anyone else is connected to their router (not like I'm sticking around using their service, just a quick connection to see if their cable is working...9 times out of 10, it's the cable service, so they have no connection either).

Cyrus

You should hook up to their printer and send them messages like, 'not the blue shirt, the white one looks much better with those jeans' etc. It will make for some interesting stories when their printer starts talking to them.

Make it say things like 'im so lonely, please sit next to me and keep me company'

Poop-Loops

I prefer the direct route, i.e. uploading massive amounts of horse porn on their computer.

Chi Meson

That's the first thing I did with my new MacBook. Our next door neighbors have an Airport Extreme AND an Airport express going in their house. The express is attached to a sound-system, and I tried to play some of my more "difficult" music through it. Didn't work. Then I printed out a photo of our kids waving hello on their super high res printer.

Even though they are good-natured people, they didn't find it too humorous. Pehaps because each 5 x 11" print from that machine costs over $5.

Poop-Loops

See, you went wrong when you decided to get traced. If it had been good old fashioned horse porn, they would have been none-the-wiser.

montoyas7940

I did that to my oldest daughter when I was setting up my home network. She was upstairs on the computer w/printer and I printed "Hello Emily", she came running downstairs screaming. She is a little dramatic. I was going to remote desktop and run SAM to talk to her but I didn't have the heart.

waht

Looks like we have true hackers in our midst.

Mk

By the way, for anybody that wants to password protect their home wi-fi network, make sure you use WPA, not WEP. WEP is old, and takes about 30 seconds to penetrate through the front door.