I want to start a WAN for my neighborhood. Too hard for me?

[jasong]

Being a rambunctious moron with a high mathematical IQ and no common sense, I like to come up with wacky ideas and look at the possibilities.

My latest wacky idea, which won't happen until middle of February, or later(If it happens at all ;) ), for reasons I'm not going to bother you with, is a Wide Area Network for the neighborhood. Since I don't want to go commercial, I'm hoping I could simply charge until I break even, if I'd even be lucky enough to do that.

I guess the first hurdle would be whether or not I could legally share my network with the neighborhood, and, if it is legal, what the constraints would be. The other hurdles, I guess, would be learning how to track people and their usage(NOT their downloading or uploading habits, just bandwidth).

Comments? Flames? Guffaws?

[tnerual]

here is the biggest problem:

if you share your network and only one person find that it's fun to send a email to the cia with something like "i will kill mister bush @ 10 today with a bomb", you are legally responsible. and that is because YOU are the owner of the network. So you must be able to track all mac address, all the time, say wich mac address belong to wich people.
it's a very big concern and for exaample, my company (big provider) has set hotspot and has invested millions to be able to track activity.

even if you don't share your network, you put WEP encryption and Mac address lock ... if someone go inside (very easy) and do illegal stuff, you are responsible because you didn't protect your network (WEP and mac are too weak protection) just use WPA.

[jasong]

here is the biggest problem:

if you share your network and only one person find that it's fun to send a email to the cia with something like "i will kill mister bush @ 10 today with a bomb", you are legally responsible. and that is because YOU are the owner of the network. So you must be able to track all mac address, all the time, say wich mac address belong to wich people.
it's a very big concern and for exaample, my company (big provider) has set hotspot and has invested millions to be able to track activity.

even if you don't share your network, you put WEP encryption and Mac address lock ... if someone go inside (very easy) and do illegal stuff, you are responsible because you didn't protect your network (WEP and mac are too weak protection) just use WPA.
I guess there's a lot of stuff I need to learn first.

[PCZ]

Jasong

I can see a couple of problems with what you propose.

1: You are not allowed to share you inet connection with others outside your household,
Your ISP could cut you off for misuse.

2: As others have already mentioned if someone else does something irresponsible / illegal using your inet connection it will be you who is brought to task.

It would be very difficult to prove another person done it without exceptionally good logging.
Even if you did prove it your ISP would still be pissed because you shared your inet connection against the T@C's.