Would you share your Wi-Fi with your neighbour?

oldernonethewiser

Mistral001 said:

daivid said:

Mistral001 said:

Gavin83 said:

We used our neighbours Wi-Fi for a few weeks after moving in and waiting for ours to be setup, which saved us a lot of hassle. Only seems fair for me to return the favour if put in the same situation.

Since they have the password, you will never really know if they are using it or not.  It might become just a little too handy to use it when they want to change suppliers.

Log onto your router and you can see which devices are using it. 

We have shared when one or other has had connectivity issues. This with neighbours we knew well enough to look after the children of and visa versa, broadband is pretty insignificant really in comparison. I wouldn’t do it for money saving though, given our house's construction some effort would need to go into giving both houses decent wifi signal, borrowed wifi was ok for picking up emails but no use for heavier use.

I did not know you could log onto your router  and see what devices are using it.   Do many people routinely do that though? 

Probably not but no harm in checking periodically.

The wifi on my router is disabled as I use a MESH network and I check what is conected to that via an app.

Andy_L

Eldi_Dos said:

Think I would rather share my toothbrush with neighbours dog than give anyone outside of family the password to router.

Giving The password to the router is different to letting them use your wi-fi 

warwick2001

A few moons ago, when internet packages came with 'fair usage' policies, our terraced next door neighbour's (good friends, had a fabulous relationship with them, had them over for dinner etc. many times) teenage son managed to get us suspended from our provider as he had downloaded vast amounts of p0rn using our service. It only came to light as I couldn't access my emails. After much too-ing and fro-ing, our service provider described how we could find out which devices were connected to our router. And we found his computer was connected.

I found it hilarious, boys will be boys, and all that. His parents were mortified, and made him come round and apologise. Poor lad, I've never seen anyone so red in the face. They also made him pay for our internet for the next year, which was nice.

greensalad

I shared mine with a friend who moved in next door for a while. I was happy to at first because she didn't really use much internet. I asked her to give my partner some beers every now and again in lieu of payment as he was the one paying the bill. Worked fine for a few months but then she stopped giving anything in return, got a Netflix account and started working from home so her internet usage skyrocketed and slowed us down. I was really annoyed she never offered to pay towards it at that stage (nor give the promised beers) so I turned it off in the middle of the day 

pieroabcd

Not at all.
They could be accessing illegal content, take part is DOS attacks, write something questionable somewhere or doing something illegal in general (as someone else said).
You definitely don't want to be accountable for someone else's misdemeanours.

frugalpam2023

No chance!

frugalpam2023

Absolutely not. Who knows what they can access via my Internet connection and what they might be downloading.

Dustyevsky

For the past 10 years or so, our only close neighbour's unsecured wi-fi has been available to us, but we've not used it, honest!

DullGreyGuy

Whilst staying overseas for an extended period the villa we were renting had a 4G router that was okish for most things but wouldnt work with the VPN I had to use for work. The landlord lived next door and had FTTP connection, did speak to the telecoms company about getting FTTP but there were no connections available and so he allowed us to use his broadband for work.

Sharing broadband is almost certainly against the terms and so wouldnt do it on a regular basis. Our wifi does have a guest network which in a "cup of sugar" type scenario I wouldnt have issues with sharing with either of our neighbours as we've plenty of bandwidth and never triggered any fair use type provision despite moving around terabytes of information at times. 

A previous commercial unit came with shared wifi, it was officially so and not a problem with terms, but that meant things like wireless printers etc were a no go else you may find a neighbour randomly printing docs on your printer rather than theirs when they chose the wrong one from the list. 

searchlight123

subjecttocontract said:

We have a holiday home in Spain which we visit around 6 or 7 times a year. Our neighbour there let's us use her Wi-Fi for free when we visit. 

How funny. I was just about to post exactly the same thing. Our neighbour in Spain lets us do the same. We get around 12mb speed on wifi this way but that is plenty to watch tv on a HD Firestick. In fairness, he is a bit older than us and we do help him with a lot of things when we are over there, like you 6 or 7 times a year.