Sharing your Wi-Fi connection with a neighbour could be illegal

South African households should be aware of legal issues and terms of service violations for sharing access to their home Wi-Fi network with neighbours, particularly when charging for that privilege.

With fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity rapidly expanding over the past few years, more households have access to high-speed uncapped connections.

Even though FTTH offers very good value for money compared to alternative broadband technologies, its pricing may still put it out of reach for lower-to-middle-income households.

This can be particularly relevant in cases where an expensive fibre network operator (FNO) is the only one providing connectivity in an area.

High prices are particularly prevalent when an estate or complex has an exclusivity agreement with a specific Internet service provider (ISP).

Desperate for reliable connectivity, such households may be willing to pay a smaller fee to share the subscription cost by sharing the password to their Wi-Fi connection.

MyBroadband asked Wireless Access Providers Association (Wapa) Paul Colmer about this practice and whether it was legal.

Wapa represents numerous wireless Internet service providers (Wisps), which use Wi-Fi spectrum to provide connectivity in areas without fixed broadband.

Transmitting a Wi-Fi connection into a public space requires an Electronic Communications Service (ECS) or Electronic Communications Network Service (ECNS) licence from ICASA.

However, if your home is next door to a public space, the low power levels of your router and the fact that you are not deliberately trying to transmit into that public space should exempt your from requiring a licence.

Things can get a bit more complex when transmitting over the boundaries of two adjacent private properties.

“The key point here is not going into public space, but rather crossing it to connect someone,” Colmer said.

A property wall divides properties by law, but the nature of Wi-Fi is that it bleeds onto other properties.

“The effect is compounded in blocks of simplex housing, where your Wi-Fi can be ‘seen’ by the units above, below and to either side of your unit,” he said.

Colmer said that “buddy-buddy” agreements with no money changing hands may not be an issue. However, charging for a shared service requires the subscription holder to have an ECS licence.

In addition, Colmer said that users would also be breaking their Internet service provider’s terms and conditions by aggregating their connections.

Enforcement rare — with some exceptions

However, Colmer said enforcing the regulations was virtually impossible, and action is rarely taken against users except for more serious violations.

MyBroadband has regularly written articles about data-hungry users consuming multiple terabytes of data in a month, indicating that they could share their connections with multiple neighbours.

Due to FTTH’s capacity, many ISPs are spending fewer resources on monitoring unusual activity and appear less fazed by the sharing.

Colmer explained that the biggest problem was unscrupulous wisps using home connections for network backhaul. This is alluring because the prices of a home line and aggregated ISP service differ substantially.

“The providing ISP has some trap codes in their network operations centres (NOCs) to try and detect this situation,” Colmer said.

“However, most are closed down by other legal wisps complaining to representative bodies like Wapa and asking us to have them switched off.”

“This is considered blatant Wi-Fi sharing, where many do not have licenses, and the instances of which I report to Icasa for investigation.”

However, Colmer said that some of these rogue Wisps would merely switch to another ISP if their account was shut down.

Colmer likened the practice to people sharing access to their DStv account and charging others to use one of their five streams for a fee.

“The practice was crippling DStv, and they have since scaled down the offering [of concurrent streams],” Colmer said.

Colmer added that the regulations were less clear-cut regarding edge cases, such as a neighbour asking to connect to your Wi-Fi if their Internet is down in exchange for small gifts like food.

He added that most reasonable people should not see a problem sharing their Internet for morally justifiable reasons.

This includes giving access to an elderly neighbour because she’s on a pension and needs it to call family and friends for emergencies.