As a little background to the question, I’m moving from where I live because cost of living is way too high. I have found a few apartments that are within my budget but they all have “complementary WiFi”. Is there anything I should be aware of?
the router admin page was left on default login credentials
i used it to throttle everyone else’s internet when I had large downloads or video calls. I was the horror story
(this is not good neighborly behavior and years later in retrospect i regret it)
Shouldn’t QoS* priority be the same thing just less obvious? If you wanna be just a little bit of a horror story
I mean, I did sorta try not to be a nuisance with it. At least for large downloads I tried to do those late at night and then unthrottle once they finished
but one night I fell asleep with the throttling left on and then the next morning my landlady knocks on my door with one of my neighbors who’s rather distraught looking, and says “I know this is weird to ask but you’re my granddaughter’s age and she’s good with tech… [neighbor] works from home and can’t get her video calls to connect, can you reset the router for us?”
10 minutes later I’m a “hero” and got to experience a truly deserved level of guilt 🫠
Not all routers have it
From an ISP side:
We came and took over a building after the previous org was kicked out for subpar service and was only awarded the contract because the CEO was on the board.
3 building 4 floors each, 2 switches per floor. Every switch was in default config mode with the same IP so no troubleshooting could take place.
Claimed a 50Mb connection to each apartment but only purchased a 100Mb wholesale service to service the entire building. 96 apartments sharing a single 100Mb service…96 apartments sharing a single 100Mb service…
RIP. That’s cruelty.
Oh wow. Did an electric tion select and connect the hardware? 😅
Its worth asking about the internet details if you’re interested because I’ve found more and more people just calling any internet access “wifi”. Chances are it is central access points operated by an MSP that you have no control over and may or may not work well.
I’ve had several customers where I discover their entire apartment is on a double NAT AND on a shared LAN.
Typically, its not that awful, but there are also lots of landlord specials that use crappy repeaters or the building is locked to a shady contract and you can’t do anything to get better service.
If you are renting a room, the “complementary WiFi” is likely the homeowners router and you’re at mercy of that setup.
Wifi and cellular internet can frequently provide subpar experiences that are sensitive to jitter and packet loss such as video games or voip.
tldr, you might have a hard time getting your own internet service. Before you sign anything, try testing it with this tool. https://speed.cloudflare.com/
Some of these complexes are 40+ apartments and defenetitly have sketchy setups. I did do speed tests while I was there since reliable Internet is necessary for my job. Most came back with sub par results but and Ethernet connection to the access point yielded around 240 down 200 up.
My main fear is the terms of condition of using the network… Some of these places use deep packet inspection and while I’m not worried myself due to already being privacy oriented it’s others on the network I’m worried about.
So, that test I posted also shows the condition of the connection. Not sure if your tests also had that.
Your concern is warranted, the nature of the connection can be difficult to determine. You could use a home router setup to connect to a trusted endpoint such as a VPN service. That would help you avoid immediate concerns, should that not be possible due to aggressive filtering methods. I wouldn’t sign that agreement, but if forced to do so due to circumstance you could work with your company’s IT department for a suitable solution, and for personal look into network privacy tools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_network
I would at least use secure dns and https everything.
My uni dorms used to have ethernet ports in them but someone came along and disconnected them all when they joined the Eduroam system so now anyone on campus has to use WiFi. I ended up having to install WiFi dongles on my pc when I moved in because I couldn’t figure out why the port wasn’t working.
I had a similar situation where my internet source was Wifi via the guest network of the landlord’s router. Eventually I setup an openwrt router which connected to that guest wifi as client, and networked it to ethernet connected devices. Since this meant I couldn’t use wifi on my own network (hardware limitations, I guess), I connected another router to that one via ethernet to distribute wifi as well. Don’t wanna know how many network problems this created, NAT was the obvious one.
It really depends from building to building.
If the building has a ton of bandwidth, good QoS rules and not too many people on the network all at once, the only downside is that you won’t have any control over the network and cant make any changes.
If the building has a shitty connection, no QoS, or too many people, then you are likely to get bad service.
Sure! The idiot who owns the building basically hired the cheapest people he could find and it shows. In pretty much everything.
But as for the networking: every flat is on the same LAN. Which makes managing it impossible because the ISP’s Mikrotik is basically what your router usually does.
The flats are separated by some VLAN magic, but the technician was bitching around for two hours when he was setting it up.
For me that means that whenever I want to open a port, I have to call my ISP. And that setting up a lan-backed mesh network at home I had to be very creative.
If iOS says that too many networks are using the same frequency it might actually mean an incorrect password
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Complimentary WiFi is free. Complementary WiFi may not be free and probably is a companion to other services but not the whole thing by itself.
