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Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

I live in a high-density multi-family apartment block. 300 families in a small space.

There are probably at least 300 SSIDs being broadcast in this area, plus Bluetooth and other noise.

This is a low-income joint, so amenities are comparatively minimal, but there's just no excuse for not forging a deal with one of the local ISPs and having their WiFi/Ethernet to blanket the property, convincing residents to shut their personal ones down in favor of a robust replacement. (I don't know how you do that, but the benefits are obvious.)

In fact, when I moved in, their marketing material blurbed "High-Speed Internet!" but it turned out they just meant that the wiring was present for us to hook it up.

There is already a WAP supplied by my own ISP directly below me, and I can easily, seamlessly move to using it instead of my in-home network, which is great during an electrical storm.

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Sorry but at home I would like to connect to my WiFi, with my preferences and access to my local network. The last time I was forced to use a common access point was in my dorm at the university, and even then I bought a small travel router to rebroadcast the AP.

But I do understand what you mean. I guess one thing to do is to set the router to not broadcast at full power, and use 5GHz to limit the range.

My old apartment (built to rent) had a pretty sweet scheme. You connected to a shared WiFi network throughout the building and was put in VLAN 0 with all the other unauthenticated devices, but once you signed in (captive portal) you were bumped in to your own private VLAN and you could only see / connect to your other devices.

The only downside was any device where it wasn't convenient to login to the captive portal had to have its Mac address registered to your account.

But what if you spoof the MAC address?

> convincing residents to shut their personal ones down in favor of a robust replacement.

You would soon be looking at oopsies like mirroring onto someone else’s TV, or a bored teenager hacking into everyone else’s “smart” Internet of Shit devices. WPA2 personal just isn’t secure for shared residential use.

I know it's far from perfect. But there has got to be an answer for it. Because everyone running their own WAP is a massive duplication of resources, it's literally a waste of power citywide, every's got a separate ISP bill, and it's clogging the airwaves, making everyone's reception quite lousy in the process.

Multi-family apartments have communal services on purpose. We have a central A/C chiller. We have communal laundry rooms, not machines in every unit. Our hot water heating is done centrally. We have maintenance men on staff for repairs. Subcontractors serve the entire property through deals with the landlord, not individual units.

I get that people like to customize and trick out their own networks, but we're a community of sysadmins. My neighbors are not, and I'd bet you that misconfiguration is the norm for personally-managed networks. There is a better case for single-family homes doing it, but apartment dwellers should not be running their own ISPs.

the "solution" is most likely that a shared wifi will be good enough for 90% of the people, and the 10% of us that want to do something different will still get to run our own access-points.

the problem i see is the placement of access points so that they can be maintained without entering peoples homes but still reach every room.

What I want for a "High-Speed Internet!" apartment is a wired internet. Just use my own 5GHz or 6GHz AP.

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