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I was surprised to find on my Kindle wi-fi services other than my own BT. One was a near neighbour. Is it possible to use a neighbour's service, thereby adding to his phone bill, or vice versa?
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If your neighbours one is BT as well, then yes you probably can. No only do you pay for the privilege of using yours, you pay for using their as well.
If you are not a bt customer, then no you can't get any service out of another BT hotspot.
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"pay for it"
I thought when you are with BT the access to other BT hotspots was free (in exchange for making your own hub open)?
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Yes "pay for it" BT is dearer than anyone else, so you "pay for it"
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Depends if the neighbour has secured the network. Not all do, but round my way, all the ones I can receive are. My stepfather's isn't but as his is inside a stone built house in the country, and the next door house is cob, no-one not in his house could receive it anyway.
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>> If your neighbours one is BT as well, then yes you probably can. No only
>> do you pay for the privilege of using yours, you pay for using their as
>> well.
>>
Are you saying that a BT Home Hub or whatever on a domestic connection acts as a public hotspot? Even if the subscriber has set the security, which is normally default on BT routers? (the last one I saw had a sticker with the preset wireless key on it.)
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"Are you saying that a BT Home Hub or whatever on a domestic connection acts as a public hotspot?"
It can do. If you sign up for BTFon, you can piggy-back other users' Home Hubs after entering a password, in return for which your own Home Hub is available for such use. However, in theory the speed is much reduced.
I am signed up, but have never actually used it.
See www.btfon.com/
Last edited by: FocalPoint on Thu 17 May 12 at 15:02
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This will answer most questions that you may have.....
www.btopenzone.com/help/common-questions/index.jsp
It is, by default, not switched on, my only security concern is the encryption of the password during the logon phase since you have to use your primary email address and password.
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OpenZone seems to apply to public places where wi-fi is provided as a service, not your next-door neighbour's Home Hub.
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There was an idea we would all run our little home wi-fi hubs unsecured, creating a vast publicly available network.
But then a householder was arrested after a bloke outside his house with a laptop downloaded some illegal porn.
From memory, the householder was eventually acquitted, but after that no one in their right mind would run their network unsecured.
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Mobile phones also display available wi-fi coverage, including hot spots, or that such as the BSkB service, the Cloud, in pubs, restaurants etc. Apps such as FreeZone can also be used:
free-zone-wi-fi.en.softonic.com/android
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I take the security of my home wi-fi network pretty seriously and I think every home user should "harden-up" their own to more than their ISP's defaults.
I use and have for a very long time, WPA2 encryption. I think that as a default is more common now.
I have changed the default user name and password for access to my (Linksys) router settings.
I have a 28 character password, made up of random alpha-numeric characters and symbols.
I have disabled broadcast of my network SSID and have re-named the network from the ISP's default.
Finally, I have made sure that the router's firewall is enabled and restricted communication from the router only to our own laptops, identified by their unique MAC numbers.
None of these precautions is totally unbreakable, of course, but taken together, it would take a very determined hacker to obtain access: hopefully more trouble than a casual "drive-by" free-loader would be bothered to take.
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>> But then a householder was arrested after a bloke outside his house with a laptop
>> downloaded some illegal porn.
>>
>> From memory, the householder was eventually acquitted, but after that no one in their right
>> mind would run their network unsecured.
Had his network been "secure" but the bloke with the laptop had hacked in anyway, the householder might have had even more difficulty.
There's a frightening tendency for "scientific" evidence to be accepted at face value - vide also Sally Clark, and the story in the Telegraph yesterday about the bloke from Devon who was arrested for rape and spent two months in jail for a rape in Manchester, despite the fact he had never been there, when the lab cocked up the DNA profile.
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Many thanks for all of the above. BT assure me I am safe so long as I don't give my Admin Password to anyone else.
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"...I am safe so long as I don't give my Admin Password to anyone else."
But that's only half of it, isn't it?
You need to re-set your wireless security key to something only you know. And to get a "strong" key you need a random sequence which
is at least 10 characters long, but no more than 63
is a combination of numbers, upper-case letters (or ’CAPITALS’) and lower-case (or ’small’) letters
does contain punctuation, but no space
is not a name or a dictionary word
does not repeat the same character one after another (e.g. aabbccdd00)
is not a commonly used key like ’abcd1234’, ’welcome1’, etc
is not the same as information given elsewhere on your Hub (e.g. your Hub Manager’s password, serial number or wireless network name/SSID)
according to BT advice.
Do it now!
Last edited by: FocalPoint on Fri 18 May 12 at 14:35
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"But then a householder was arrested after a bloke outside his house with a laptop downloaded some illegal porn."
Do you have any more details - I have the feeling that this might be a bit of an urban myth but I might be wrong.
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CGN -
Here's a link to a report of the story - but how reliable the source is, I couldn't say:
tinyurl.com/7m6zudm
Last edited by: FocalPoint on Fri 18 May 12 at 17:22
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>> Here's a link to a report of the story - but how reliable the source
>> is, I couldn't say:
Oh! It's in America!
Oh! Well, that's it then!
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Tap into neighbour's wi-fi? - Zero
