I live in a fairly secluded area and never bothered to encrypt my WiFi AP. I am just too far from anyone else to need to go through the hassle… Or so I thought. My Internet performance has been so degraded lately that I can barely work.

I have further had to reset the AP a few times in the past few days.

I noticed today that when I was looking at available wireless networks, another WiFi signal was coming into my house. I decided if I can see another AP then other people can see mine. A bit of sleuthing turned up two people on my access point who were sucking down my bandwidth.

I never had to deal with WEP keys till today. In my office MIS has been nice enough to deal with this in my office. Well come to think of it I have had to set WEP keys on a number of WiFi phones.

In hindsight, I was pretty lucky. I never even changed my admin password so I am glad I didn’t get my AP hacked.

This shows me that even in rural Connecticut where houses are spaced far apart the ability for concepts like mesh networking can take place. Of course if such a network were to be built we would need to ensure one or two users don’t suck up all the bandwidth like what just happened to me.