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?
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?
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