I've run my AP open for some time. I've noticed people logging in to use it, and most of the time they've been reasonable. But lately, some people haven't. I've had to reboot the router several times to clear off the freeloaders so people in my house can get what we're paying for. I could close off the AP, or put nodogsplash on it, but I was thinking that a better idea would be for me to make an easy way for me to set up a WISP for my neighborhood. I doubt anyone around here is smart enough to spoof a MAC address, so I was thinking of providing the first 500 MB for free, and then $1/GB after that. I'd have people create accounts and pay me by paypal.

I am not trying to run a business here, this is my home, but I am getting pressures from my two housemates who I split the cable bill with to do something about the freeloaders who are clogging up our bandwidth. I want to be a good neighbor and also give reason to my less generous housemates to keep some open option, but showing that neighbors can help pay the ($70) high cable bill.

Any ideas? I have several WGT634U, and some Avilas, left over from when the city was going to pay me to build a free muni wifi network (which failed).

That's grand!  I think you should provide the service and strive to cover your costs.  It gets complicated real fast when some start to hog the bandwidth but its easy enough to restrict the access and provide what most everybody wants.

Collecting the money might pose problems in itself.  Is it legal? Do you have to get a license?  Once you "offer" a service you have to provide it.  Maybe you can explore a coop arrangement.  I'm thinking as I write this and my thought now is: does your ISP allow this?

Personally, I would leak out some bandwidth to let the "homeless" have a place to sleep but  not impact your operation.  Like all handouts, there's no expectation of anything in return.

Paul

I can clamp down on bandwidth hogs, both within my household and outside of it, by flow management.  This I am going to implement no matter what. The other day I downloaded a new Ubuntu CD and it came so fast that one of my housemates found she couldn't check her email - whoops! But I asked her to wait a couple of minutes and try again.

As far as legal -- I really don't know. The service I provide will be packets, as opposed to a connection. There will be some users who will be just on the edge of the coverage area, which will not find the signal to be reliable - the 500 MB free usage should be enough for them to evaluate the quality of signal before they pay for it. I haven't heard of anyone around here getting in trouble for sharing their wifi signal, but perhaps if I were to charge for it, I might get some flack. If that happens, I can pay more for a business account or move to another ISP.

Were I the type of person who thought that it's my bandwidth and I can do whatever I want with it, I would take advantage another service I am working on, which is a VPN tunnel to a server which has plenty of bandwidth and IP addresses.

I think it's not illegal in most countries, however, that could be against your contract with your ISP unless you have a "commercial" service.
One of my friend changed its SSID to "$10/month internet" and his phone number. Nobody contacted him yet.
You are very nice to your neibours if you take the time to have a way to count their trafic and give them 500 MB free :-). It could be easier just to make them pay for unlimited access and use QoS to make their trafic lower priority so that your housemates get the full speed. This is assuming you don't have low monthly caps.

(Last edited by zorxd on 2 Oct 2009, 17:07)

http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

Charlie

I'm thinking you can sniff the traffic, trace it to the offending party, and then monitor their traffic for good blackmail materials.  May not be legal in all locations...

The upside down one there is great too. 

I set up a cron job to run the SMB header exploit. If they're running Vista or 7 then they just BSOD. Also IPtables to redirect all web traffic to my webserver which shows them a very nasty page.

Seems to work well. I have one AP that is still WEP for my Wii and DS, and maybe about once a week someone cracks it. I live in a high traffic area