I just moved into a student dorm for a semester abroad, and beforehand I emailed them asking whether they had ethernet ports to plug my router into (I use it to connect all my devices, and for WiVRn VR streaming). They confirmed that I could, but now that I’m here the wifi login portal is asking me to accept these terms from the ISP, which forbid plugging in a router. There’s another clause that forbids “Disruptive Devices” entirely, defined as:
“Disruptive Device” means any device that prevents or interferes with our provision of the 4Wireless to other customers (such as a wireless access point such as wireless routers) or any other device used by you in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy;
So what are my options? I don’t think I can use this service without accepting the terms, but also I was told by the student dorm support that I could bring a router, which contradicts this.
EDIT: some additional context:
- dorm provider is a company separate from my uni (they have an agreement but that’s it)
- ISP (ask4) is totally separate from dorm provider, and have installed a mesh network that requires an account. On account creation, there are many upsells including one for connecting more than one device. The “free” plan only allows me to sign in on a single device, and I can upgrade to two devices for 15 pounds.
- ethernet requires login too
- VR streaming requires a high performance wifi 6 network, which is why I bought this router (Archer C6 from tp-link)
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Are these restrictions set out by the ISP or the dorm?
If you don’t do business with the ISP, then you don’t have to agree to and follow their terms.
So as long as the dorms doesn’t have rules against setting up your own WiFi, then you should be well within your rights to purchase an Internet connection from another provider, but since you are likely not allowed to get your own line installed, you are probably restricted to ISPs that provide a service over the cellular network.
Of course using a cellular connection will give you worse latencies for online games, but at least you can have your own WiFi with low latency for your VR.
If you want to be nice, you could then run as much of your Internet network over ethernet as possible, so you congest the air waves as little as possible, possibly only running the VR headset over WiFi, and maybe even only enabling the WiFi radio when you want to play VR. If all your WiFi devices support 5GHz, you might also completely disable your 2.4GHz WiFi, to leave the most congested frequencies alone.
To lower the chance of someone complaining about your WiFi, you should configure it as a “hidden network”, such that it doesn’t broadcast an SSID, and therefore doesn’t show up when people are looking for WiFi networks to connect to.
Connect your PC to the network then run internal networking as you like through a 2nd interface?
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As someone whose job it is to deploy and manage wifi at a small university-adjacent student accommodation, these are similar to my rules. There are enough students that know enough to cause a problem, but not enough to know the pitfalls. It’s best to just blanket cut this off for everyone’s best experience.
Can you give some examples of issues you mention?
A few stories:
I’ve had a student install a super cheap (g only) repeater to provide wifi to their car in the car park, due to its location a number of students ended up using that rather than our APs. This slowed access for them dramatically.
I’ve had a student physically remove an AP to get to the 2.5 gigabit port they connect to, they somehow thought that would be better than the 1G they have in their rooms, despite it all being the same link out.
An overseas student cloned a MAC of their device to a travel router and effectively ran a VPN server for their family to try and give them an IP in our country.
The accommodation only has an hour of my time per week or so, they’re not paying a lot so issues only get dealt with when I have the time for them, this leads to an extended period of bad access for folks and many complaints to the staff.
The main point of the story is that not all students take the experience of their neighbors into account. Hence the restrictions.
The difference here is that the ISP is up charging for multiple devices, meaning this isn’t all being done for benevolent reasons.
The way many apartments work for non-students is each has its own WiFi. Honestly compared to how bad some Hall’s WiFi is this is a better option, but it’s not without problems. A lot of ISP routers either don’t support or don’t turn on by default DFS channels, 5.8GHz channels, 6 GHz band, or have WiFi 6 for BSS colouring. This means there will be loads of interference between adjacent WiFi networks.
It’s really frustrating especially when you have ISPs like Virgin whose kit has DFS support, but despite touting smart wifi they just never enable it, and most people don’t know to enable it either.
Yea that is true, there’s definitely either a profit motive or they don’t think they have the bandwidth for everyone to have multiple devices and are this introducing an up charge/scarcity to cover up that.
The site I look after we have a restriction on device numbers, 5 per room. Even that is flexible and not really enforced as in reality the network will be fine with thousands even. The main restrictions are about device behavior and preventing causing interference or outages.
There’s only 120 rooms in the site I look after so it’s not massive.
We’re running W-Fi 6 with all channels enabled including DFS channels. We’ve great coverage (roughly one access point per 4 -6 rooms in a 90s building).
Not OP, but I’ll add on some more complications.
Your network is designed with the minimum number of access points you need to have really good coverage. Adding more access points to the rooms increases interference and takes up usable frequencies. Rogue access points are hard to find and university IT has very limited resources.
That enterprise gear of the colleges using it’s part of a bigger picture system with alerts and alarms and the ability to see an address problems and locate issues effectively.
I can’t comment on the ‘device limit’ as I don’t remember being a thing, but I was at an ASK4 affiliated living quarter 5 years ago or so.
Back then I was able to plug in my router just fine. I disabled WiFi on it since I didn’t need it and used it as a regular switch just fine.
Man, things sure have changed since I was in college. The university had one /15 and three /16s so every single ethernet port everywhere on campus had a publicly routable IP.
Napster was so goddamn fast…
Full 10Mbps line speed!
I work in university IT so I have some experience here. Some schools are better than others but in general providing IT services for students is like trying to wrangle a herd of starving feral cats who are all in heat.
First of all I have never seen 802.1x implemented (Ethernet authentication) in the wild that wasn’t almost immediately removed. It’s a shitty protocol that’s terrible to debug. I totally get why they restrict APs … my god if every student had one it would be a pain. It would be like standing in a crowded room with everyone shouting and you’re trying to pick out one conversation 20 ft away.
My guess is you’re basically in a situation like my son was at ECU. It’s likely not really a university dorm but closely affiliated hence the reason of a third party. Or the central university IT is abysmal and can’t be bothered. Either way the only reason to use 802.1X is because they think it’s more secure, when in fact it’s way more trouble than it’s worth. You can do the same thing by controlling downstream routing or MAC filtering. The ECU “dorm” did that and it wasn’t much better honestly. You had to go into a website to add your MAC address to get access to the WiFi. Firstly how do you do that when your computer can’t talk to anything. Chicken and egg problem. Secondly for the ones who figured out how to do that using your phone, good luck getting a history major to figure what even what a MAC address was.
My suggestion is don’t bother. If they’ve implemented 802.1x they’re a micromanaged IT and will catch you eventually. I’d also guess they have completely overtaxed their egress traffic and your speeds are abysmal.
On a related note, when you graduate never ever rent from an apt complex that generously process WiFi or Ethernet. It will almost always suck, they will have no one to provide adequate tech support, and they are just using it as another revenue stream.
Sorry I don’t have better advice but if they control the network there isn’t really much you can do.
I was once responsible for a student house (we don’t have dorms in the US sense, this is the closest we have) and I have similar experiences but less extreme. My favourite was when I had forgotten to configure DHCP filtering and someone plugged in a router the wrong way so it started offering DHCP (that didn’t work) to everyone in the building, in a race with our upstream ISP.
I did this a work one time… sorta the same thing. I installed pfsense VM and left the DHCp server on. I killed the network in our office for about 15 minutes.
Also, the times rats got into the networking room and ate random cables. I should add the network was built by volunteer students in the ‘90s.
pretend you didn’t read it and press the button
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Honestly this sounds like a bit of a pickle. If I were in your situation I would just use one of the cellular carriers 5g internets. I personally use a T-Mobile 5g internet hotspot with a fresh tomato flashed nether 6700 plugged into it. Then I basically do all of my networking from that. Latency is a fair bit higher (usually about 30-50ms) but upload is significantly better than spectrum.
As someone who has administered networks and written policies like this the concern here is that you will run an open network that may be used for piracy, hacking, DDOS or to send bomb threats. Tracing down this type of behavior is required by law and allowing students to run open networks makes this near impossible.
Not only that, but managing wifi channel congestion in a dorm is a pita.
It’s tough enough when you fully control the airspace, to have nice clean coverage and overlapping cells.
But then add dozens or hundreds of individually managed APs in a tiny space…with DFS and/or 160MHz channel widths?
Ops best bet is to get their own 5g home internet and plug in.
You’ll be hard pressed to get a router to talk to a captive portal sign in…but if OP wants to get creative, this can easily be fixed with a dumb switch and a Linux PC with two NICs. You could use windows for this, but why would you?
Shit, ask4? I think they were the isp when I was at uni about a decade ago. I’m sorry to hear they’re still kicking.
If it’s still the same as back then, all the dorms are essentially on the same lan and they’re using Mac filtering at the gateway. Since this was before Https became ubiquitous this meant you could sniff other people’s http requests.
What you do (what we did) was sign up with one device and setup a proxy on it. I think we used squid-cache. But anything that will masquerade the traffic as coming from that one device should do the trick.
Yes, i think squid proxy would do the trick too. It even has installers for windows.
Not a lawyer but if you have an email that says you can, I’d argue it’s override the ToS assuming the person giving permission actually legally can.
Anyway I bet what they avoid is reselling access so I believe as long as you don’t pay for yourself then resell to others you’ll be OK.
This. The ISP isn’t going to care about (or notice) a single person using a router. They will notice and care if 1 person is consuming the data of 20.
The email says that you can do it. It doesn’t say that you can do it without purchasing the upsell option.
And importantly, the email is from my dorm (whose contract simply said they provided free fast wifi), while these unexpected T&Cs are from the dorm’s ISP.
Can you use a switch for wired devices or is that also a no-no?
Switches are also explicitly banned as they allow bypassing the device limit.
Is the VR streaming in the Local net (PC to Headset)? Just run the WiFi router without plugging it into the wall. Connect only the pc and the headset.
Also, appart from that, to use more wired devices, maybe use an unmanaged switch. Don’t think that does anything forbidden here.
