Should I Share an Internet Service With My Neighbor?
Great broadband internet access is worth a fortune, unless you are lucky enough to live in a place that has decent fiber-optic connections for under $ 100. (If yes, do you need a roommate?)
I live in Silicon Valley, which means I’m stuck with Comcast and have to fork out over $ 100 a month to enjoy the super-fast service that is capped at 1TB of total downloads – $ 150 a month if I want to pay. Comcast for an extra privilege. use as much data as I want. This kind of fee is enough to get anyone to find a creative way to share costs, and Lifehacker reader Fitz suggested a fun idea in a recent email:
Can I and my neighbor share broadband? Will it work if I take an Ethernet cable from his router and plug it into the router’s WAN port? Also, do I need a router with a modem if my neighbor’s router already has one?
Technically, this plan could have worked. Make sure you take the time to turn on your router’s hotspot mode (or otherwise turn off DHCP and its firewall) and your devices will get their IP addresses from your neighbor’s router – just as if you were connecting to a cable modem. to the router directly if it is configured as a normal router. And no, you don’t need a cable modem with a built-in router.
However, in this broader context of providing your neighbor’s internet service with access, there are several problems. First, you need to make sure that you are getting a high quality Ethernet cable that is rated for maximum speed over whatever distance you need to travel between your neighbor’s house and yours. (I am assuming this is a house-to-house plan, not apartment-to-apartment.) This will likely be Category 6 waterproof cable, at least which will set you back about $ 50 for a 100 foot cable.
Cat 6 specification peaks at 328 feet for gigabit speeds; more and you risk performance issues – or the connection won’t work at all. So if you and your neighbor have a lot of work to do, you might instead invest in installing a powerful wireless bridge (which will undoubtedly cost more).
Even if you take the Ethernet route that I would recommend, I hope you have found a new way to run the cable between the two houses so that you don’t accidentally cut, cut, or otherwise ruin it. And of course, if that cable ever fails, you’ll have to run it between your houses, which can be a headache. I like to use cables more than wireless whenever possible, but this may be the case where the latter, if powerful enough, is worth the convenience.
Now, if you’ve created physical connections, there are two more questions you can think about. The first is safety. Do you trust your neighbor? Do you trust that your neighbor will not insert some kind of man-in-the-middle installation or packet sniffer on the network he controls and uses this to dig up your passwords, log what you do, and otherwise cause havoc in your network? digital life? I suspect this won’t be a problem in most cases, but a general rule of thumb to keep in mind is that using your neighbor’s connection basically makes you a user of their network, and they can do a lot to ruin your day – even things as simple as enabling bandwidth controls or lowering the priority of any connected devices that don’t belong to them. In this scenario, I would let all my traffic go through the VPN, but it can affect your speed and be annoying.
Second, there is the bandwidth limiting issue that I talked about earlier. If you use Comcast or any other provider that gives you a monthly service limit, you will need to find out if you can remove that (by upgrading your service level, or perhaps paying an additional monthly fee). Otherwise, you and your neighbor will have to spy on your web traffic like hawks, since now the two families will share the data limit, which is usually calculated for one. And none of you probably want to be surprised at the huge bill because the other has downloaded too much in a month.
By the way, what happens when your neighbor’s kid decides to go crazy and use BitTorrent whatever he can find without using a VPN to hide his activity? Are you and your roommate willing to risk (and agree) that whatever each of you does with your shared connection could affect or ruin the experience of both homes? Is your neighbor willing to accept the consequences of everything you do online that is now linked to his account?
Also, what if there is a problem with the internet when your neighbor is absent during the day – or on a weekend, or on a month’s vacation? Will they give you permission to enter your home and reboot your router or cable modem? Is it even possible to add you to the account as an “authorized” user if you need to contact your ISP directly for service?
What happens if your neighbor doesn’t keep track of device or firmware updates? What if some malware is using your public network to intercept your information or is otherwise causing havoc on your systems?
This whole idea – while great for saving money – also likely violates your ISP’s terms of service. You might get away with it, but I also don’t want to think about what happens if or when they get angry about stealing services (or whatever they describe it).
I’m not saying do n’t, because I’m totally in favor of pestering this person, especially when most ISPs nowadays push you to pay as much nickel and dime as possible. However, there are serious problems with sharing an internet service with your neighbor. Think about them before embarking on this plan. (Let me know how things work if you try!)