<p>Is there any reason not to share a wireless internet network with a neighbor? Has anyone here done that to cut down on costs? Assuming the neighbor is a trusted friend, and that the signal is strong enough, that is.</p>
<p>Two people in my neighborhood seem to be doing this - it got me curious.</p>
<p>When my son and his wife were first out of school, they got an apartment in DC right below their best friends.</p>
<p>They shared a wireless network for two years. They put the router on the top shelf of a closet in their bedroom.</p>
<p>No problems.</p>
<p>Doing this freed up a bit of money for two couples both on very tight budgets.</p>
<p>You don’t REALLY know your neighbors. Do you really want to take the chance of them doing something illegal over your network (spam, child porn, etc)?</p>
<p>And before you say you do know them think back to every story you’ve ever read about people doing this kind of stuff. There is always a quote from friends saying “we had no idea, they were the nicest people. We thought we knew them.”</p>
<p>Hey if you want to take the chance of someone appearing at your door with a warrant that’s your business. But there’s a reason there’s the saying “Good fences make good neighbors.” A secure, private wi-fi network is a 21st century fence.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t want to be the one who doesn’t have the router in my house. Any time the power goes out around here the router has to be manually be reset-- I’d be really annoyed if I needed to get on the internet and my neighbor wasn’t home.</p>
<p>My streaming TV shows also freeze up or lag if we are downloading something while we are watching… so I probably wouldn’t be able to watch tv any time my neighbor was making a large download.</p>
<p>If you have the router, you set it up with a password and share that. You can then get lots of tools that monitor usage, like if you have a usage cap or if bandwidth throttles. You can see if people are using the net more than you expect or if there’s a bunch of strange computers connecting. It’s not hard to do.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t do it. Not only do you maybe not know your neighbors as well as you think you do, do you know everyone they might possibly share the password with?</p>
<p>I mean, maybe if they were family or someone you’ve known since you were eight or something, but in general… no…</p>
<p>This reminds me of when my neighbor behind us put up a fence between the two of us. We both thought about putting in a gate so our boys could go back and forth instead of climbing the fence since it was a fair walk around the block.</p>
<p>Our lawyer, said, no gate. Bad idea. If you got into a fight then what do you with the gate?</p>
<p>I agree with Emaheevul07. Sometimes there have been times we have needed to keep resetting the router due to connectivity issues. What if your neighbor wasn’t home? You don’t really want a key to their house to go reset the router.</p>
<p>Your internet service provider might (probably) have it in the contract with you that you’re not permitted to share that connection with a third party. I just checked mine and it explicitly states this. So, what you want to do probably isn’t legal but you can check with your ISP to see what they have to say about it.</p>
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<p>Umm…I would LOCK the gate ;-)</p>
<p>Staring at a gate with a lock on it is not the same as there just being a contiguous fence. Every time you glance to the back of your yard, you see that gate, the one with the lock on it. The one that seemed like such a fun idea when you got along with your neighbor.</p>
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I don’t share routers with my neighbors, but I do have keys to three houses, and we have spare keys with one of our neighbors. We feed fish, water plants etc. I’m too lazy to share a router, and ours needs to be reset almost every day, but I don’t worry about what my neighbors are up to.</p>
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<p>In the big picture, we all share one large network - the Internet. All you are sharing is how you connect to the network. The person with the connection to the internet always has the better connection. Proximity in a wifi network is everything. Adjacent apartments is easier than adjacent single family homes. Option 1 is commercial grade wifi bridge with directional antennas to connect the two homes. Option 2 is run a physical cable between the houses.</p>
<p>For twice the cost, you can get 10 times, or more, speed. Yes, the TOS says you can’t share, but how are they going to find out? As long as you are not running a business …</p>
<p>All my equipment is on UPS (keep cable phone service running), so power isn’t a problem, unless the outage is for a whole day. That is an easy way to reduce problems.</p>
<p>Just make sure your neighbor does not have disproportionate needs, like a bunch of teenage kids all streaming vidoe at the same time. If not, a 20mb bandwidth should be fine (mid rage for cable, high range for dsl). Which reminds me - unless you only use it for e-mail and light surfing, don’t share a DSL line. Can’t get enough bandwidth.</p>
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It’d be theft from the cable company. It’s unethical and dishonest. That’s enough reason for some people not to do something like this.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the comments. I was just curious, as I learned about two people who were doing this and hadn’t heard about it before.</p>