Legitimately Stealing Internetz

I moved in to a new house about a month ago which goes to show how little I’ve posted here. After leaving Stafford I moved back home to Newark in a nice house. It didn’t have internet as you’d expect when moving in to a new house. As a networking student I was pondering what to do about this, I saw a couple of options here which were; One: get Virgin Media installed, Two: Get BeThere installed. That’s really the only options for anyone looking to get broadband in the UK; Cable or ADSL. I was hoping I could get ADSL that way I could get a nice block of IPv4 and/or IPv6 and host various services after cancelling my co-lo server. However, being Newark the ADSL availability is rubbish and the providers I’d want to go with don’t even provide in Newark… So like many I was stuck with only one option. Virgin Media…

I gave them a go, ordered the 10mb service well in advance to avoid being without internet at the new house however they messed that up. For a start the nearest installation date was a week after moving in and the day before installation they advised they couldn’t install it just yet as they needed to do some work before they could come around, apparently 2 1/2 weeks isn’t a large enough time-range for them to get their act together.

This was going to leave me without the internet for about 2 weeks and as networking student (now with a networking degree) I thought I could solve this problem and I did!

One of the advantages of the house is that it is a stone’s throw away from my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, the house with the internet. I quickly worked there is an option three. Steal some internet from someone else. Having discovered this I noticed that the houses are near enough to setup a wireless bridge and as I have access to my parents’ house it was very easy to reconfigure everything so I could setup two D-Link DIR-615 access points running DD-WRT to provide a wireless bridge.

An hour later I had the internet. My parents have Virgin 10mb and now so do I. So I thought to myself, do I even need my own internet connection? The answer is probably not, I have access to the 10mb via the wireless link, I get 10mb speeds, I do all my downloading at night, I’m now at work all day and the wireless doesn’t affect xbox live game play… So I got my Virgin install cancelled and now I’m saving just a little bit more because I’m stealing my parents internet and they’re OK with it.

I’d recommend it to anyone, if you’re in the position to do so… I may even write a how-to on it sometime although the information is already on Google.