Is this allowed?

[machavez00]

My mom lives about 300ft down the street and has cable internet. Is it permissible to use a wireless bridge to her home to connect to the internet? I have two Linksys WAP11s(802.11b) and Cantennas (directional). I have her permission and it is under the limit of computers for her account.

[ajtmcse]

My mom lives about 300ft down the street and has cable internet. Is it permissible to use a wireless bridge to her home to connect to the internet? I have two Linksys WAP11s(802.11b) and Cantennas (directional). I have her permission and it is under the limit of computers for her account.

I'm pretty sure its in violation of the terms of service.

Now having said that, its definitely doable, and for all intents and purposes, they'll never know you're doing it. Make sure the connection is encrypted with WPA or WEP so no one driving by picks it up.

Have fun :)

[funhouse69]

As mentioned by another poster it will depend on your ISP and their terms. The reality of it is that your current ISP would probably never know as long as you aren't using a ton of bandwidth.

That said check out Speakeasy.net they actually have very liberal terms of service (the best I've seen) and they provided me with the best DSL Service I've ever had (and believe me I've had my share).

[machavez00]

Make sure the connection is encrypted with WPA or WEP so no one driving by picks it up.
The wap11 is set to "bridge mode" and will talk only to another wap11 and must have the correct mac address.

[Stuart Sweet]

I guess I'd read the terms of service. Fast internet's not that expensive and so I tend to be ethical about that stuff. Sure, one person doing it isn't going to hurt anyone but if everyone did it, then there would be trouble.

[Nick]

I've found that from an ethics standpoint, if one has to ask if it's okay,
it probably isn't.

Usually, the provider's TOS will restrict access under one account to a
single address. Having said that, a local cyber cafe I attend on a regular
basis, (unintentionally) broadcasts its Wi-Fi signal to several adjacent
businesses, including a bar & grill five doors away on one side, and a
billiard parlor immediately next door on the other.

(Yes, I know...the cyber cafe is in a cheezy location, but it's a great place,
nonetheless.)

[johnarama]

It probably violates the terms of service as someone pointed out, but at worst, I don't think you'd be risking much...maybe a 1% chance they'd find out and send you a warning letter...

[DonLandis]

Nobody mentioned this but from a technical side, wifi, 802.11x has certain latency restrictions built in that will limit the range of the signal for high speed. Your error correction will begin to go out of sight as the distance goes beyond 150 ft. This was done for security reasons and limit it's range in a busy city. Yes, I know that there have been long range record set by wifi experimenters but it is suspected that those experiments were using hacked systems and the duration of work was more of a capability than a reliability. I know on mine, I get signal at 200 ft. but the the data quality is sh!t. It works great when I get to 80 ft. or closer. I believe I heard or read this somewhere.

There are also TOS that allow reselling of the signal. Doubt it be worth it, however.

[machavez00]

pulling 4Mbps down 525k up

[HIPAR]

My mom lives about 300ft down the street and has cable internet. Is it permissible to use a wireless bridge to her home to connect to the internet? I have two Linksys WAP11s(802.11b) and Cantennas (directional). I have her permission and it is under the limit of computers for her account.

I have a Wi-Fi relay system working. It uses a directional gain antenna and bridge associated with a Wi-Fi internet router on channel 11 about a 1000 feet away. The output of the bridge goes directly into the WAN input of my local wireless router which is set to transmit on channel 1 with its unique SSID. It works very well for Email and Web surfing.

Turn off the security encryption until you get it working.

Hell .. go for it. :p

--- CHAS