State Specific Question About: MAINE (ME)

This comes up now and then. I think a lot of it comes down to this from the "con/against" people:

1. The Roadrunner Terms of Service likely don't allow this. You generally can't buy your service from them and then give it away to others. This is kinda like you renting your place to someone and then that someone squeezing in another few people and charging them rent for the rooms.

2. There may be legal liabilities that you would be taking on if someone uses your connection to do illegal things -- if you are unable to answer WHICH of the tenants was doing it. There are devices that can track this though -- but they are usually not cheap.

Of course, I'm sure lots of people still do it. I'm just giving you what is normally stated as the big 2 "negatives" of attempting this.

- John...

P.S. A third side issue is that you then become tech support when they can't get their wireless to work because they messed something up on their PCs...

I'm not an IT guy but I it seems each time someone mentions setting it up for tenants, most are against it? Yet I see more and more free wifi areas set up at businesses all the time in my area. In fact, one is close enough to one of my rentals that I was able to pick up the signal while working on the unit a couple of weeks ago.

My opinion is based on pain avoidance, not morality.

It's just that as soon as you "provide wireless internet" YOU will get to handle all the complaints that "it's slow" or "it's down" or "I think the other tenant hacked into my computer, it was working yesterday!" or.......

You are opening yourself up to a big PITA.

DavidB: Around here, the price to do an account that has a TOS that allows you to let others use the net from most ISPs is around $240/month. At those levels, I'm not sure if it would be worth it.

Although, I admit, I'm not sure how the "free wifi" things get around legal issues. If someone is uploading child pr0n through the free WiFi at Qdoba, it seems like there would be little way to track them -- and that seems like a problem.

The point is that if you just use a residential connection (or anything else without a TOS that allows you to give access toothers) and one of your tenants starts uploading child pr0n, then I think that they are going to come to YOU when it gets caught.

- John...

If you had a tenant that runs what I run at home, all your bandwidth could get sucked up leaving little for others to use. thsi will cause huge performamce problems unless you can limit the bandwidth usages per user. In addition, you will need to administer who can use your wireless while preventing unauthorized access from nearby wireless users. This means you need to manage encryption keys and possibly use MAC filtering to allow only specific people and devices access to the service you provide.

John

Sorry about the typos in my last response.

John

Sorry about the typos in my last response.

John

I work in Information Risk Management and I can tell you that people are much more likely to do illegal things when they are on a "free" connection. I won't even get into the terms of service issue with your provider.

Great points especially having to reset the router. But it would seem that providing it could make a difference with a small apartment building. The thing I'm still curious about is the liability of what someone does on the connection. I haven't seen comcast or starbucks get zapped yet. But then again maybe that's the key word...yet.