You’d probably have to check the agreement you signed with your ISP to see about the ‘legality’ of this. I know I asked my ISP (2 years ago so things may have changed) about putting multiple computers on the same line (in my house) and I was told ‘officially’ that they do not support it but was told ‘unofficially’ to do whatever I pleased as long as I didn’t call their tech support with any problems related to this.
As to how well it will work it will probably work just fine. 1.5Mb is a pretty fat pipe and you should both be able to use it without much problem. Of course, if your neighbor starts downloading thousands of songs the RIAA will come looking for you…not him. This could also slow you down significantly if he is nuts on the download thing. However, depending on your equipment, you may be able to throttle his connection. That is, you can specify that he has access to, say, 500Kb of the data pipe leaving you the rest so you’re guaranteed always good to go.
In Australia (and I appreciate you may be elsewhere), selling bandwidth via a wireless network requires you to have a telecommunications licence. You may want to check whether you need a licence to resell bandwidth.
You can feed it to him free in Oz, but you can’t charge.
Oh and if you wanted to share via a cable, you would also need a telco licence and a cableing licence to lay the cable.
You could feed it to him “free of charge” and ge could “pay you as a gift every month for being a cool guy”. Then you’d be fine, assuming it was illegeal wherever you are
Check the fine print in your contract. I doubt very much that it’s “legal” (legal in the sense of adhering to the wording in the contract). It’s one thing to share the connection among computers within one household; it’s quite another to split the connection with a completely different house. Replace the word “internet connection” with “cable TV connection” in your OP and tell me what you think…
Well my reasoning was that I was paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, and I would be allowed to do whatever I wanted with it.
I can’t use more than has been assigned to me, afterall.
So if I decide to log on my uncle who lives with me, my pet monkey, my girlfriend, and my neighbor upstairs I didn’t think it would be aproblem, because we’re still not using any more bandwidth that I’m paying for.
If I was sharing cable TV with my neghbor, he IS using more bandwidth than was given me (I Believe).
It seems the law doesn;t agree with me though
Oh well, it would have been ncie to split the cost as it is getting damn expensive.
Setting up a home network using your Comcast Internet account without the knowledge of Comcast and paying additional monthly fees violates your agreement with Comcast. At best, if Comcast were to find out they would cancel your service. At worst, it’s called theft of services.
I call BS on that one. You are not, in setting up a home network, intercepting or receiving a service without the knowledge of Comcast. They know you, you have an account, and you aren’t taking more than you’ve paid for. The fact that you may be using that bandwidth among many computers is, as far as I can tell, none of their business. They’ll say it’s unsupported, of course, but there are three very distinct uses of ``unsupported’’ in IT. One means this is not technologically possible', and one means this is quite possible, but we don’t want to waste our time trouble-shooting in for clueless users. If you have a clue, go right ahead. But don’t ask us for help if it goes wrong.’ And the third, which is only used by idiot service providers, means `we don’t have a clue how to set up our services to limit what you can do, so we’ll leave all sorts of things wide open and then sue anyone who doesn’t use them in only the way we intended.’
'course, if comcast are idiots, there’s no particular guarantee that the courts won’t be just as naive about computer stuff and side with them, so this should not be construed as legal advice, YMMV, etc.
And as others have mentioned, selling services may require a license, so you might want to work out an unofficial barter where y’all are just sharing stuff because you’re all socialist-commies at heart
Whether legal or not, if he’s paying for half the service, he’s going to do what he wants to do on the service - on your contract. What happens on YOUR account is going to end up being your responsibility. So, if your neighbor or any of his family or houseguests download kiddie porn, music, etc., it’s on you.
Also, regardless of the bandwidth you pay for, when 2 or more computers are sharing said bandwidth, performance will slow down, especially if you are doing bandwidth intensive things, like downloading.
If I were you, I’d tell the guy thanks, but no thanks; and if you feel you must offer an explanation, that you already have X number of computers on your wireless network and don’t want to risk the performance hit.
Also, just because he can “see” your network connection doesn’t mean that he’s going to get adequate performance from it. He’ll take a performance hit because of the distance from the base and barriers between.
I’ve called Comcast support in the past, and they’ve worked with my on my LAN. Sure, their troubleshooting step was directly connecting to the modem, but they did try to help <aside>I hate the fact that they follow scripts before they admit there’s a problem. I know how when it’s my equipment or a bad connection.</aside>
Also reading through all of their policies, they no longer make mention of it being allowed to share your own computers behind a router! Instead they seem to be touting their “home networking” option at an increased price! They “rent” you a wireless router for $5 per month (I bought mine for $70). Additionally it’s only a wireless router; no 100Mb/s, and you can’t take advantage of your built-in LAN card. I don’t know what brand it is, but they also claim that peer-to-peer between Macs and Macs/PCs won’t work. Wow! What a flawed product and stategy. I suppose if they get pissed about your own router, though, DSL is always available.
In any case, if you were going to go ahead and cooperate with your neighbor anyway, you’d have to worry about (1) him paying consistently, and (2) you’d be tasked with maintaining equipment uptime. If the cable is down, he may not want to pay you full 50%, even though Comcast will still charge it. If your router breaks, you’ll have to instantly provide a new one. Seems like a lot of headaches.
Oh, and I wanted to point out, sharing connections seldom slows down anything, unless you’re viewing the same sites. I know I have a wide pipe, but most commercial websites and otherwise are throttled. Downloading from Apple may use close to 100% of my bandwidth, but most other places deliver files much more slowly. I can usually maintain four separate 50k/s downloads from different servers that are fast enough (anyone know how to increase Safari’s limit???), switch to another program, and still not notice any real speed differences.
My friend went around the neighborhood with a laptop & found lots of unsecure connections. I wonder if the cable company does the same thing-searching out people using illegal hookups?
Cox in Phoenix has been fine with home networking with a router and has only asked that I disconnect it and make a dedicated connection to one machine when troubleshooting a problem as they don’t support home netwroks. In fact the hold message for tech support says to do just that before the tech answers the phone. They do charge for an additional IP address but this is only relavent when you don’t have a router and require a fixed address.
I use a wireless router but have it secured against unauthorized use. TheLadyLion’s and my desktop machiens are wired 100mbps and my work laptop is wireless and has VPN for when I need to work from home.
