How to Share Your Wi-Fi With Neighbors During the Pandemic

OTI's Nat Meysenburg and Claire Park wrote for Slate Future Tense suggesting ways to securely share home Wi-Fi networks with neighbors during the pandemic.

If you live in an area where basic broadband infrastructure is lacking, you may not have consistent internet access to share with others. However, in urban and suburban areas where there is widespread broadband infrastructure, opening up your network may help neighboring households that are underserved or can’t afford fixed home internet service. Opening up your personal network may provide schoolchildren—who might otherwise have to rely on mobile internet to connect with their teacher or do their homework—with steady fixed home internet service. One teacher in South Africa asked a neighbor for Wi-Fi to get online and hold math class. Additionally, with some internet service providers halting home visits for installation or maintenance due to the pandemic, a neighbor may also ask if you can share your Wi-Fi network with them until their connection is fixed.

The easiest way to share your Wi-Fi securely is to simply give your neighbors your password. This isn’t the most technically secure approach, but if you know and trust your neighbors, go ahead and slip the password under the door of that neighbor who you know doesn’t have an internet connection.

If that’s not an option, there are a number of ways to securely set up a separate “guest network” for your neighbors to access. This is a little bit more difficult, since every router comes with a different interface, and not all suggestions work for every device. But our instructions should help you figure it out if you can.