Thou shalt not share

Earlier this year, I wrote about sharing WiFi with my neighbours through a small mesh network, and how glad I was that Teksavvy’s Customer Agreement & Internet Usage Policy doesn’t explicitly forbid sharing or redistribution. Well, that’s about to change.

Effective May 1, 2011, Teksavvy’s instituting new “Terms and Conditions of Service” that (among other things) states:

2.4 You shall not in any way resell, license or allow any third party to use the Service without receiving our prior written consent. You may not share or transfer your Services without our express written consent.

A real bummer to see our little mesh network outlawed. Other changes to Teksavvy’s policies are being discussed over at DSLR. Thanks for the heads-up, Karen.

Update: A ray of hope on the DSLR forums (again, heads-up from Karen).

You can’t block users from private Meraki mesh networks

If someone knows the WPA2 password to your Meraki mesh network, and you want to block them, you can’t. The block function only works on the public network. Meraki’s Jeff Gould explains in an email to me:

The blocking function works only on the public network. There is no blocking capacity on the private Meraki Network. There are a variety of folks who would like to have this functionality and I believe that we will have features to address this in 2009.

Wow. So, like, sometime this year? That’s kind of vague.

Right now, it seems the only way to keep someone that knows your password off your network is to change your password.

Mesh network update

My little Meraki-based public WiFi project has expanded south.

Marty Millionaire on the southwest corner of Queen and Parliament now has a repeater.

If you’re in the neighbourhood, look for SSID Corktown .