My university had student apartments, each had their own router. No weird rules since it wasn’t the university’s network at all, it belonged to whoever lived in the apartment. Full router access, connect whatever, put it in bridge mode and connect your own if you want.
Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers
Telorand@reddthat.com 2 months agoSo it’s a network operated by a third party? That’s interesting. The handful of universities I’ve been to maintain their own.
ngwoo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Telorand@reddthat.com 2 months ago
If there’s enough space between them, it would be less of an issue. If it was in a multifamily high rise with hundreds of units, I would expect it to cause issues.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 months ago
Is this a problem with 5G networks? There are more channels and they don’t go through walls as well, right?
Telorand@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Tl;Dr It’s complicated.
Do you mean 5Ghz networks (5G is cellular tech, after all)? If so, 5Ghz can travel through walls, but it doesn’t travel as far, because there’s an inverse relationship between range and channel width. Also, 5Ghz has a shorter wavelength; some of the signal’s light will get absorbed by the walls, but not all of it.
Ultimately, you’d still have the same problem: too many radios sharing a limited range of frequencies on a band would interfere with each other if sufficiently close.
It would be akin to having everyone playing different music at full volume on their own personal speaker; you’ll inevitably hear the people closest to you. Radios can’t “hear” anything outside of their chosen frequency (channel), but if other people nearby are also on that channel, you might catch or lose some unintended packets, triggering a resend event (TCP) or causing stuttering/lag (UDP).
The number of channels available for 5Ghz varies by country, with the EU having the most, iirc. In the US, if you try to force your router to use one of the blacklisted channels, your devices will likely not connect (unless they were directly imported), despite being able to use the 5Ghz spectrum.
kalleboo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Where I went to school, originally the dorms were on the university network but a year in they offloaded us onto regular, commercial ISPs. The change was great for us since the university network was very strict on stuff like torrents (using DPI any torrent, even legal, got you disconnected for 24h)