How can I prevent my neighbor from stealing my cable internet?

Question

I suspect that the neighbor/landlord may be piggybacking his cable TV and cable internet from me. Is there any easy way to prevent this? Maybe by reassigning input ports or something? Bandwidth is at a high premium these days, and I'm not interested in paying an astronomical price for a sub-par connection.

Answer 1

call your cable company and have them walk you through how to encrypt a WEP code. This is a code that you will have to enter to use to that connection and unless the person stealing your connection is a complete computer genius, they won't be able to guess the code.

Answer 2

You should have minimal cable internet theft issues if you are using Comcast.

For example, my hardware setup:
One physical cable carrying TV and internet,
D-Link DCM-202 Cable modem,
Sunrocket VOIP,
D-Link DI-524 Wireless G router with
2 HP PCs running XP Home edition
and Humax/Tivo

For the transmitted non-digital TV channels there is not much that you can do to prevent theft of the signal. But that has no impact on your services (except for possible degraded signal strength.)

For Comcast's cable modem access, you should be assigned a unique IP address specific to your physical cable modem. To verify that IP address run cmd.exe and type in the command ipconfig. This one-to-one setup should stop other cable modems from accessing your service account.

If you have a wireless router you should have already set up a WEP key to restrict access to your home LAN. You can type in URL 192.168.0.1 to see your router setup and verify the active sessions (devices connected to your wireless router.)

Good Luck!

Answer 3

In order for him to steal you cable he has to tap directly into you cable line. Typically on the outside of your building. If you see this it can be reported to the cable company and they will handle the issue.

If you think your neighbor is piggy backing on your wireless router or something like that then you will want to secure your wireless router. I don't think any wireless devices come without some form of security anymore so it is time to brush up on the devices documentation to find out what methods are provided.

Typically you are able to build access list that restrict access to only specific MAC addresses. You will need to look up your MAC address by opening a DOS prompt (Start, Run, cmd) and typing in the command ipconfig /all which displays all of you interface information. Look for the line labled Physical Address this is your MAC address and place that into you Wireless router to be allowed access. This method can be circumvented by him setting his PC to use the same MAC but you most likely will notice this since only one PC at a time can access the network.

You may also want to use shared password security. This will prevent MAC spoofing. To do this you will need to not only configure your wireless router for Shared key authentication but your client as well. This method also allows you to encrypt data transfers between your client and the wireless router with methods such as WEP. You will enable this on your router have the router generate a key and copy that key into your client configuration. This gets pretty detailed so I am not going to ellaborate any more on this but I am sure your documentation for your wireless router discusses it. Anyway hope I helped have fun. By the way backup your configuration before you start muking with thing just in case.

Answer 4

Contact the cable company. They will be able to tell if he is using your connection. He will have to have an illegal running into his place to be using it. The cable company will be able to detect it.

Note that he is not only taking your bandwidth, but the bandwidth of every person on that particular cable.

Answer 5

you will need to contact the cable company. this is stealing a fcc signal and is punishable by a fine and prison time...but the cable company needs to be informed...'cause it is not your signal they are stealing...it is the cable company's signal.

good luck

Answer 6

report him to your cable company.

Answer 7

its simple just on the security settings and put the password for ur net services so no one in ur surroundings can use ur net

Answer 8

He plugged modum into my computer?????