How to keep your neighbors from hijacking your Wi-Fi

January 16, 2014

Rose’s Internet service intermittently slows to a crawl. She wants to make sure that her neighbors haven’t hacked her Wi-Fi for free connectivity. A number of issues can produce intermittently slow Internet access, and most of them don’t involve foul play. You could have bad cables, a bad modem or router, or simply outdated firmware on either of these devices. The problem may be with your ISP, and therefore completely out of your hands. For more on these possibilities, see my past column on obscenely slow Internet connections. Also, check out Nick Mediati’s primer on how to test your home Internet connection speed. But as much as we’d like to think otherwise, your problem could be with a dishonest neighbor. And in these days of data caps, such neighbors could be running up your bill as they’re slowing down your connection. [Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2086565/how-to-keep-your-neighbors-from-hijacking-your-wi-fi.html#tk.rss_howto