question from the landlord owned router thread

Ok in this thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=841930d

The op is moving in to a place where the ownership controls the internet

My questions are on the "no illegal/questionable downloads… does management for this type of setup do the monitoring its self ? or does it go through a service or wait for the provider say hey apt 122 has illegal goat felching pics please discuss in a monthly report type of thing?

Although if its single person ownership id think the owner is either 1 just repeating what the legalese is from the service provider or 2 has issues that would make me wary about the whole setup …

Any business arrangement is possible. And as you say, some guy owning a duplex and renting out half is a very different situation from a 1000 apartment complex owned by a publicly traded corporation that owns 200 complexes in 35 states.

Most hotels that have wifi have long since subcontracted all of that to some third party. The third party runs the access points, controls the routing and filtering, provides the 888- help desk, and all the rest. Which would include, to the degree they choose to bother, monitoring for TOS violations.

The obvious difference with a hotel is that most rooms turn over nightly whereas apartments turn over annually or less often. So in an apartment there’s a lot more opportunity for any given miscreant to do enough stuff to eventually get noticed by even not very aggressive TOS monitoring.

That’s not an answer to your Q, but I doubt your Q has a single simple answer.

Hardwired connections its safe to assume they can narrow it down to an apartment if need be, wifi, not so much. either way they can figure out what device address connected to their network was accessing what external IP addresses.

For example

a device with a mac address of XX:XX:XX:XX was accessing a movie download site.

admin with access to the router can very easily block that device from accessing the router and wait for the customer to complain about service not working to discuss the matter with them.

Since, as we know, most businesses have hopelessly outdated security and infrastructure, chances are the landlord has no history of connections, and when a complaint is received from an IP owner, has no way of identifying which client, last month, was downloading.

(Actually, upstream providers still have the same problem, so not all identifications are correct even at that level)

Note: IP owners never get your MAC: that information is not passed upstream.