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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That seems pretty standard stuff. My dorm had the same policy, because they operated their own mesh network and didn’t want students sending out their own radio signals that would have absolutely made their wireless network not work well.
Is there some reason you need your own router?
ETA: The student dorm people probably meant a network switch. Regular, non-techy people don’t usually know the difference between a router and a switch.
Yeah, the interference argument is fair, but I think this is also the ISP (totally separate third party) trying to protect the paid plans they sell for connecting more than one device…
trying to protect the paid plans they sell for connecting more than one device
It’s definitely 90% of the reason
In that case, just set up a router level VPN. The university probably doesn’t give a shit. Which is why the help desk IT kid said it’s fine, probably.
It’s the 3rd party ISP just being greedy. The ISP may not even care as long as you’re not running an insane amount of traffic through it. Often this type of stuff is added to TOSs to allow them the option, if you’re being a bad actor.
So it’s a network operated by a third party? That’s interesting. The handful of universities I’ve been to maintain their own.
My university had student apartments, each had their own router. No weird rules since it wasn’t the university’s network at all, it belonged to whoever lived in the apartment. Full router access, connect whatever, put it in bridge mode and connect your own if you want.
If there’s enough space between them, it would be less of an issue. If it was in a multifamily high rise with hundreds of units, I would expect it to cause issues.
Is this a problem with 5G networks? There are more channels and they don’t go through walls as well, right?
Tl;Dr It’s complicated.
Do you mean 5Ghz networks (5G is cellular tech, after all)? If so, 5Ghz can travel through walls, but it doesn’t travel as far, because there’s an inverse relationship between range and channel width. Also, 5Ghz has a shorter wavelength; some of the signal’s light will get absorbed by the walls, but not all of it.
Ultimately, you’d still have the same problem: too many radios sharing a limited range of frequencies on a band would interfere with each other if sufficiently close.
It would be akin to having everyone playing different music at full volume on their own personal speaker; you’ll inevitably hear the people closest to you. Radios can’t “hear” anything outside of their chosen frequency (channel), but if other people nearby are also on that channel, you might catch or lose some unintended packets, triggering a resend event (TCP) or causing stuttering/lag (UDP).
The number of channels available for 5Ghz varies by country, with the EU having the most, iirc. In the US, if you try to force your router to use one of the blacklisted channels, your devices will likely not connect (unless they were directly imported), despite being able to use the 5Ghz spectrum.
Where I went to school, originally the dorms were on the university network but a year in they offloaded us onto regular, commercial ISPs. The change was great for us since the university network was very strict on stuff like torrents (using DPI any torrent, even legal, got you disconnected for 24h)
I’m not advocating for breaking any rules, but many people dont know that you can hide your wifi routers SSID. even fewer people know how to track these networks.
Most commercial networks systems have the ability to detect rogue access points by analysing the radio spectrum, and hiding the SSID will not avoid detection once traffic starts flowing to it.
And they can triangulate the position of the rogue AP.
Interesting about hiding SSIDs, I never knew why that option existed. I’m here on Erasmus so I don’t want to risk too much by knowingly breaking rules… them triangulating it to my room and starting a legal case or something sounds real scary.
them triangulating it to my room and starting a legal case or something sounds real scary.
It’s also incredibly unlikely unless you’re actually causing problems
If you really want wireless, do the Ethernet > Desktop/Laptop with hotspot and limit it’s TX power WAY down to minimal levels.
You should be able to use it within your dorm room fine, but will have trouble penetrating beyond the walls and will also make detecting and triangulation quite difficult
So technically I should get away with connecting the router and making an AP right? I can’t do a hotspot from my laptop because the performance is not high enough for streaming (this is why I bought a dedicated router).
In that case I would pickup a cheap USB Ethernet dongle (or 2 if the laptop doesn’t have an onboard one)
Wall > Ethernet 1 and router > Ethernet 2
Configure windows to share Ethernet 1 connection to Ethernet 2 (Builtin functionality since Windows 7 iirc)
Configure the router for minimal power to the radios, use your laptop to handle captive portal and there should be no DHCP interference concerns with the Windows laptop on the middle in this fashion
Boom done, congratulate yourself a lil for a small win over corporate greed lol
Also, connecting an access point that doesn’t broadcast its SSID has another side effect: all devices configured to connected to it will periodically broadcast a signal to search for that hidden AP instead, so it makes you even easier to track down anywhere else.
That’s assuming they’re actively looking. Hiding your SSID is more to prevent someone from getting suspicious and calling out the ISP.
So most dorms don’t want you using your own routers because a bunch of student routers causes A LOT of inference.
You should probably reach out not to the dorm folks but the university networking folks as they’re the ones that will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to turn things off/disconnect you.
A cheap networking switch would probably be okay by them to get some more wired connections in your dorm room (routers aren’t really a great way to do that).
As a secondary concern, using a router will cause a double NAT for all your connected devices (universities don’t operate in the way ISPs do). That could cause some weird networking shenanigans, particularly for anything peer-to-peer like online games.
That’s good advice, however this dorm is not part of my uni (just a partner to provide housing) and the internet provider whose T&C I’m expected to accept and sign up for 1y of are a totally separate legal entity, that has a bunch of upsells for stuff like “connect more than 1 device” (which my router/AP would basically be bypassing, and I think that’s what these clauses are about). About the interference, is it possible to limit it severely while still having a reliable connection just within my room? I only really want to connect:
- Laptop (wired)
- Phone
- VR for streaming from laptop
You may want to update your OP. Not being part of the University, makes a HUGE difference and will affect your options. Typically, when people say “dorms” it’s direct University provided housing.
Options in this case:
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Just play dumb, nobody expects anyone to actually read TOS.
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Setup a router level VPN.
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Buy your own hotspot for Internet access. (May be cheaper to just pay for additional devices)
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You can do a few things to reduce interference if the device broadcasting the signal supports it. Unifi APs support these settings. Most routers with WiFi probably do not support transmit power.
- Adjust transmit power to lower setting
- Higher the frequency, shorter the range (but that frequency may be highly used in the area), so #3 is the better option
- Analyze the frequency usage and picking a frequency that is least used
- If 2.4Ghz band isn’t necessary disable it and only use 5Ghz since it’s a higher frequency it again has a lower range.
- You could also faraday cage your room so the signal won’t leak out, but thats probably more work than its worth.
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.
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.
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.
Mine didn’t either when I lived in a dorm. I got around the network block.
- Plug Xbox 360 into ethernet wall port
- Log into uni network, get internet
- Plug router directly into pc.
- Assign router same ip as Xbox
- Spoof router mac address to match xbox
- Unplug from pc
- Quickly swap cable in wall from Xbox cable to router cable, Indiana Jones style
- Internet for 1 month. Repeat monthly.
Hacker on steroids.
this gives me playstation 1 CD swap vibes
(inserting a legal cd to pass verification and then swapping it for your own cd)
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TIL you aren’t a wireless professional until your hacks comes with a cinematic soundtrack.
You’re not a wireless professional if you use wired ethernet cables…
Robust but complex solution:
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Set up an encrypted VPN at the router level. Any encryption will work, even weak dumb encryption is fine. Any attempts to decrypt it would be mad illegal.
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Turn off your SSID.
It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.
It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.
You should really spend some time learning about WiFi signals. Tracking down rogue Access Points is a pretty common thing and having the SSID turned off does fuck all to prevent it. On the easy end, many enterprise wireless network controllers have rogue AP detection built right in and will show you a map of the location of the rogue AP. Harder, but still entirely possible, is running around with a setup just detecting the signal and triangulating it.
Yeah, I mistyped part of the sentence. Should have been “without some serious effort or illegal methods.” Serious effort is well beyond most ISP’s. They aren’t sniffing wireless AP’s then busting down doors to find out if its a 5g AP or an AP using their network. I actually know quite a bit about WiFi signals. I happen to be certified in Meraki (CMSS). If the uni said “no wireless signals” that would be a completely different story.
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Using your own WiFi router also bypasses the wireless security settings to access the school network.
Some resources are only available while on the network (printers, access to library, academic papers, other student hardware). Now imagine a random person in a coffee shop next door had u limited access to these resources via an unmanaged access point.
Never had access to stuff like that from my dorm, only in the library.
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.
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.
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.
Connect your PC to the network then run internal networking as you like through a 2nd interface?
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?
This is pretty typical for universities. They don’t want the airwaves clogged, doubling up NAT can lead to networking wonkiness, and they don’t want you giving university network access to unauthorized folks with an open AP.
When you say VR streaming, you just mean wireless from your PC to the headset, right? There’s a chance you could do that with an offline wireless router if the VR experiences you’re looking to play are single player.
Yep, that’s what I mean with VR streaming. The PC connects thru eth to the router, and the headset is connected to the router’s AP via wifi. I get the point about unauthorized access, but I set strong passwords and never share them. I think this clause is more about preventing me from connecting more than one device to the internet, which they want to charge me for if I do. Obviously having my own AP would allow me to easily circumvent that.
Add a wireless AP to your pc and create an adhoc wifi network for your vr to connect to your pc directly.
PC with 2 NICs would solve this surely? 1 port to the building for Internet, the other to your offline router which connects to your headset wirelessly
I remember when I was in college running a hackintosh. I was at the end of the hall and had awful Wi-Fi reception, so I just had my desktop emitting Wi-Fi for me and my dorm mate. I pirated some stuff but never seeded. I told my roommate about pirating and whatnot and showed him how to pirate Parks and Recreation. He didn’t turn off seeding. The university banned my MAC address, but luckily I could spoof one and have internet. He had to go to the dean and tell him he was sorry and that he won’t do it again to get my hardware MAC banned so I didn’t have to change it every time I booted up.
The fact that it was so simple for me to get around this ban was hilarious.
