How easy is it to piggy back my broadband?

Question

im using a bt hub , sometimes it seem really slow i wonder if one of my neighbours is using it as well

Answer 1

is it wep enabled? does it have a password? No? then very easy

Answer 2

It is encrypted, so unlikely. On a home broadband account you are subject to fairly high contention rates, in other words when it is busy everyone loses some bandwidth. If you live in a very populated area this can be quite a drop.

Answer 3

Even if you had 20 neighbors using your broadband, it would most likely not slow down your connection. Use your task manager to check and see if there are any other "users" on board. You most likely have spyware which will slow down even the fastest computer with maxed-out ram. Go to the following web site and use their free tools to locate any viruses and spybots:

http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

If you have your wireless security on (it's on by default), then I wouldn't think so.

My BT is terribly slow at busy times - it's due to traffic, never had this problem when I was on AOL.

Answer 5

well have you got password on it if so i doubt it very much that a neighbor is using it unless they cracked the code which must have taken days  to do depending on how many digits there is maybe your broadband is c**p  switch to bt vision the best !!!

orange = c**p

Answer 6

Look out of your window...is there a man in a pith helmet sitting in an austin allegro hammering away at a lap top...?

Answer 7

Is the security set up correctly?  Also, if it is WEP then I would change it to WPA-PSK as WEP is hackable in about 10 minutes.  You can also download and set up a packet sniffer which will take a record of all network traffic and then you can analyse the data to see whether there is any unauthorised traffic.  It could just be the BT connection or hardware though, my girlfriend has BT internet at her house and it is unreliable and subject to lag-spikes.

Answer 8

BT is one of the bigger companys. Unless you have changed your settings, you will have to type in a username and password to connect. You should have a white box with a dvd in. Inside this will be your username and password. If you look, they are complex but not unbreakable. You might want to consider changing it.

As for speeds, BT are slow at peak times. Nothing really you can do about it except upgrading to a faster package or changing companys. There is also some software avaible to speed up your interent connection. I have never tried this but I would assume it could work.

Another option for speeding up would be to change browser. If you are using Internet Explorer or the defaut browser that comes with the BTinterent package, consider using Safari, Opera or Firefox instead.

Hope this helps. If this doesn't answer you question, just edit it into your post and I will check back soon.