Hitching a Ride on a WIRELESS HOTSPOT

Paul_Herring

I'm inclined to side with Lakeuk on this one - if you don't want your wireless connection being used by other people, then secure it! Don't whine about free loaders.

Otherwise you don't know who else is doing what else, in your name. If 3rd parties start doing illegal stuff over your internet connection, who's the first person the police are going to come looking for once they have the IP address?

BexTech

Paul_Herring wrote: »

I'm inclined to side with Lakeuk on this one - if you don't want your wireless connection being used by other people, then secure it! Don't whine about free loaders.

Otherwise you don't know who else is doing what else, in your name. If 3rd parties start doing illegal stuff over your internet connection, who's the first person the police are going to come looking for once they have the IP address?

The point is it's illegal to use another persons Wi-Fi without consent, secured or not is not the issue - it's illegal and that's it!

Though I agree you don't don't know what others are using your internet for, do you really want a knock at the door because they believe you've been downloading child-!!!!!! or such like.

withabix

BT and Fon have linked up to provide Free WiFi, however it is only available to BTBroadband and Fon customers, so that doesn't solve the OP's problem. It is however useful for subscribers away from home. You also get free access to all BT Openreach WiFi hotspots.

BT's free WiFi works by users signing up to open a separate channel on their Home Hub for use by other BT Broadband and Fon customers (who have signed up for the service as well) for free.

It doesn't use up any of your allowance and bandwidth for the 'public' channel is limited to 512kbps.

There are a growing number of HotSpots all the time as more subscribers sign up.

More info here: www.bt.com/btfon

fwor

There are also numerous community "wireless mesh networks" up and down the country, which are run "by the people, for the people" with no commercial gain involved by the people offering their bandwidth.

Seems a bit of a risky thing to do, given that any illegal use of that bandwidth will ~appear~ to originate in your house, but there are obviously people out there that are public-spirited (or naive) enough to do it.

That does raise a question: If you were to connect to one of these nodes, how would you know that they had given consent to anyone to use it? Presumably it would not be illegal, even though you think it is (because you don't know why they have left it unsecured)...