Share broadband: save money

February 21, 2006 | article by Ken Thompson in News & Media (163)

Sharing broadband via a wireless network with your next door neighbours or even your whole apartment block is the latest social collaboration phenomenon in distributed computing. It can reduce your costs, increase your speed and enhance your download capacity. But be careful to enable your personal firewall and wireless encryption so that only those with the pin can use it and remember to disable file sharing.

Its not even illegal - but check your service providers contract.

There are even some companies who will set the whole thing up for you such as www.myzones.com.

Others such as www.Fon.com will allow you free wifi whilst travelling on the understanding that you contribute your capacity into a shared pool (a bit like how skype allows you to make free calls).

Be careful if your neighbours decide to move house as the provider will chase whoevers name is on the bottom of contact for all the money.

For an excellent article which provides full details see How the wi-fi revolution could cut your bill which suggests the following checklist of key points in shared broadbanding:

Install a personal firewall
Look into consumer VPN services
Disable Automatic log on
Secure personal details
Turn off file and print-sharing on your computer
Change the default service set identifier (SSID)
Disable SSID broadcast
Change the default password needed to access a wireless device
Enable Mac address filtering

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I wonder what the legal implications of this are though? If someone downloads illegal content such as pr0n or mp3s, then surely the RIAA will come after whoever the name of the broadband is in.

Is there any way to protect against this?

Posted by: Jamie | February 25, 2006 9:56 PM

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