New York Times

One Way to Get Online: Piggyback

By SANDEEP JUNNARKAR

Published: August 26, 2004

About to begin graduate school, Radha Patel needed a high-speed Internet connection at her Brooklyn apartment. She turned first to her cable company, only to encounter weeks of technical and bureaucratic hurdles.

Then she turned to her neighbors.

Ms. Patel, 30, asked the people living below her if they were willing to hook up a wireless router to their cable modem to give her an Internet connection. In return, Ms. Patel agreed to split the monthly cost of subscribing to broadband Internet service. Although the reception limits her to the living room, the value of the arrangement was soon apparent.

"Money became an incentive once I realized the cost of the service," said Ms. Patel, who entered a graduate program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs last fall. "At first it didn't matter because I was employed, but as a student, it matters. The lower cost really does help each month."

As high-speed Internet service evolves from a luxury to an expectation, many cash-strapped students are beginning the school year looking for ways to acquire it at a reduced cost - or no cost at all.

Most universities and colleges in the United States provide free high-speed Internet connections to every part of campus, including dormitories. And after experiencing those speeds, students who move into private housing are often reluctant to settle for dial-up access. But cable or phone companies charge $30 to $60 a month for residential broadband service.

So students use various ways to get high-speed access on the sly, the most common of which is simply piggybacking off of an unprotected wireless network in the vicinity, whether in a workplace or in another home.

Students have also turned to building cantennas - antennas made of empty Pringles potato-chip cans or coffee cans - which allow them to pick up wireless network signals several blocks away that would otherwise be out of range.

Others go a step further and crack into password-protected networks. "Students these days are getting pretty technical in their attacks on wireless networks," said Rob Carter, 24, a technical supervisor at CityNets.com, an Internet service provider in Hartford, Mich., and a student at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

He said students with technical know-how are using a program called AirSnort, which collects packets of information being sent wirelessly and decrypts the security key - a process that can take one week to several months, depending on the amount of traffic transmitted over the network. With the key in hand, students can slip past an unsuspecting owner's network defenses.

Some students share their connection with others who may be out of wireless range using cables. Justin Noack, the owner of CityNets and a recent Western Michigan graduate, said that as a student living off-campus he set up an open wireless router for his roommates. "Then I ran a cable downstairs to the girls below us," he said. "They didn't have any Internet, so I figured we could share. They cooked some meals for us in return."

Such an arrangement is not only a convenience. It can also make a political statement - or invite a legal one.

"That is like guerrilla networking," said Nigel Ballard, an advocate of free wireless service based in Portland, Ore. "It makes perfect economic sense. Someone has bought a huge fat pipe and is probably using only 10 percent of its capacity, and zero percent while away. So why not share it amongst friends and family?"

Major Internet providers like Verizon and SBC hold the opposite view. Their terms and conditions generally restrict service to one business or household per modem.

"It is not something that we are actively policing, but if it did come to our attention that someone was doing that, we would ask them to stop," said Michael Coe, an SBC spokesman.

Company policies aside, the Internet providers also warn of the security hazards of leaving networks open to strangers. An open or shared network, they say, is an invitation to people with nefarious goals like stealing private information stored on a PC.

Some smaller companies, however, differentiate themselves from their national competitors by encouraging open networks. Speakeasy of Seattle, a national provider of digital subscriber line service, offers a plan called Wi-Fi NetShare, which lets a subscriber resell access to neighbors within the wireless network's range. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) has even compiled a list of Internet providers amenable to wireless sharing.

But even some free-wireless advocates admit that sharing a connection with too many people can create problems. Anthony Townsend, a professor of communications and urban planning at New York University and a co-founder of NYC Wireless, a nonprofit organization that promotes free wireless access in New York City, suggested that as more people share a network, all the problems that can cripple any cooperative venture will begin to creep in. The problems are likely to be magnified on a network shared by students - a group notorious for sapping bandwidth with large downloads.

Larger service providers can also cut off customers or charge extra fees if monthly transfer limits are exceeded. But like most consumers, students rarely pay attention to their provider's terms of service.

"I'm pretty strait-laced and felt bad about doing this," Ms. Patel said. "I know the cable companies probably don't like it, but I was told it was not illegal."